May 2015 Artist in Residency: Anastasia Samoylova

Anastasia Samoylova, Sunny Day In the Mountains, 2015, archival pigment print, 32" x 40"

Welcome to our latest artist in residence, Anastasia Samoylova! Ana will be working in the lab from approximately May 12-June 12 in preparation for exhibitions at Good Child Gallery in New Orleans, at Deadringer Projects in Atlanta, and at the Prairie Center for Arts in Peoria. During her stay with us, Ana is looking forward to working with Hahnemühle FineArt's Baryta FB, and to building her constructions with HFA's Museum Etching paper and Photo Rag 188.

Officially:

Anastasia Samoylova is an artist and educator based in Chicago area. Her art practice is based in photographic media and installation. Her research interests include issues of the dissemination and circulation of nature-themed images in popular media. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and included in the Midwest Photographers Project collection at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and ArtSlant Prize collection in Paris. Samoylova serves as an associate professor of photography at Illinois Central College.

To quote from Ana's own 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.