Artist Bio
Anastasia Samoylova is a Miami-based artist and photographer. She received her MA from Russian State University for Humanities and her MFA from Bradley University. Her work addresses notions of environmentalism, consumerism and the picturesque. Samoylova has exhibited internationally, including Aperture Foundation in New York, Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston, and photography festivals in Belgium, Brazil, and South Korea. Her work is in the collections at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Stanford University, Yale University, and Art Slant Collection in Paris. Her monograph Landscape Sublime was published by In the In-Between Editions in 2016. She is an artist in residence at the ArtCenter South Florida in Miami Beach. Samoylova is represented by Julie Saul Gallery in New York.

"My work explores the ways in which photography is used to illustrate concepts of the Beautiful and the Natural in contemporary visual culture. I examine photographic typologies of natural and human-intervened landscapes culled from advertising and public domain image libraries online. From a compositional perspective, the work is interplay between well-established pictorial genres, Landscape and Still life. The Landscape Sublime project reflects the fact that the subjects of contemporary popular photography can be traced back to the genres in European painting in the seventeenth century. The images that I use in my photographs have achieved popularity on image sharing websites in part because they have been uploaded onto the web by their authors without copyright restrictions that allowed them to be used commercially. Such widespread dissemination of beautiful nature-themed pictures illustrates universally shared affection for landscape and points to the basic human search for the experience of the beautiful."