Artist's Statement

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 natural and human-intervened landscapes culled from advertising 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 as  related to the environment, the concepts that ultimately illustrate our worldview. From a compositional perspective, the work is an interplay between well-established pictorial genres such as Landscape and Still Life.

Each of my tableaus is an aestheticized environment constructed out of idealized landscapes 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. 

Anastasia Samoylova (b.1984) was born and raised in Moscow, received an MA from Russian State University for the Humanities, and an MFA from Bradley University. By utilizing tools and strategies related to digital media and commercial photography, her work interrogates notions of environmentalism,consumerism and the picturesque. Samoylova’s work participates in the landscape photography tradition while scrutinizing the consumable products it generates. Samoylova has exhibited internationally, including Aperture Foundation in New York, Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston, Brussels Photography Festival in Belgium, and Pingyao International Photography Festival in China. Her work is included in the collection at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and 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 the In the In-Between Editions in June 2016.

Artist's Links

Artist's website: www.anastasiasamoylova.com
Instagram: @anasamoylova