ANASTASIA SAMOYLOVA

Born in Moscow, Russia. 1984. 
Lives and works in NYC.

My work explores the ways in which photography is used to illustrate concepts of the Beautiful and the Natural in contemporary visual culture. Through my practice I examine photographic typologies of landscapes culled from stock and public domain image libraries online. My research focuses on widely circulated nature-themed images that depict such cultural constructs as Nature, Environment, and Beauty, the concepts that ultimately illustrate our world view. Each of my tableaus is an aestheticized environment constructed out of idealized landscape pictures that manifest the conventional views of the Beautiful in nature. By investigating the formal aspects of such depictions, I aim to challenge the traditional notions of the Beautiful and the Sublime in the age of lens- and screen- mediated environments. “Landscape Sublime draws together multiple lines of insight into our ideals of the natural world and the realities of our digitally mediated society, as both humanistic and photographic propositions. Samoylova’s hybridized forms of image and genre, and the deep spatial confrontations her work exudes, mirror a hyperpluralism of social and cultural values that have been revealed in the Internet Era.”Gregory Eddi Jones, Foam magazine, 2016

BIOGRAPHY
Anastasia Samoylova (b.1984) is a Russian-born photographer based in the United States. She received an MA from Russian State University for the Humanities, and an MFA from Bradley University. Samoylova has exhibited internationally, including at Aperture Foundation in New York, Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston, Suwon Photography Festival in South Korea, and Pingyao International Photography Festival in China. Her work is included in the collection at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and the ArtSlant Prize collection in Paris. In 2015, she was granted an artist residency at Latitude Chicago. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker and Foam magazines. Her first monograph, Landscape Sublime, was published by In-Between Editions in June 2016.

Photo: Courtesy of the artist 

http://anastasiasamoylova.com/