Anastasia Samoylova came of age as part of Russia’s first post-Soviet generation and has lived in the United States for most of her adult life. Straddling the line between insider and outsider, she wields a dual perspective that enriches her artistic vision and drives her passionate interest in exploring the particularities of place: how a region’s values, ideologies, and ecologies change and challenge each other over time.
Samoylova began photographing Florida in 2016. From her home base in Miami, traveled by car from the southernmost Keys to the state borders with Alabama and Georgia and up and down the Gulf Coast. The first result of these road trips was FloodZone, a book and series of exhibitions responding to the problem of rising sea levels and the fragility of the built environment in the southern United States. Her next project, Floridas, to which this work belongs, delves deeper into the state’s complexity and contradictions.
With their lush colors, layered surface, and collage-like compositions, Samoylova’s photographs and mixed-media paintings temper the shimmering seductions of the Sunshine State with an awareness of the troubling consequences of climate change, gentrification, and political extremism. The work is layered with subtle references to Florida’s complex history and to the ways it has been represented by others, most notably by the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), who traveled there for commissions, book projects, and family visits from the 1930s through the 1970s.
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