Loving Earth - PBF01 / Anastasia Samoylova
18 November 2016 - 18 January 2017
“My work explores how 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).
