NEW YORK, NY.- FloodZone is Anastasia Samoylova's photographic account of life on the climatic knife-edge of the southern United States. Sea levels are rising and hurricanes threaten, but this is not a visualization of disaster or catastrophe. These beautifully subtle and often unsettling images capture the mood of waiting, of knowing the climate is changing, of living with it. The color palette is tropical: lush greens, azure blues, pastel pinks. But the mood is pensive and melancholy. As new luxury high-rises soar, their foundations are in water. Crumbling walls carry images of tourist paradise. In the heat and humidity nature threatens to return the place to tangled wilderness. Manatees appear in odd places, sensitive to environmental change.
Liquid permeates Samoylova’s urban scenes and unexpected views: waves, ripples, puddles, pools, splashes and spray. Water is everywhere and water is the problem. Mixing lyric documentary, gently staged photos and epic aerial vistas, FloodZone crosses boundaries to express the deep contradictions of the place. The carefully paced sequence of photographs, arranged as interlocking chapters, make no judgment. They simply show; elegant, sincere, acute and perhaps redemptive.
Exhibition on view at USF Contemporary Art Museum Tampa, FL from January 17 - March 7, 2020
"Perhaps that is what paradise always was: the fantasy of a place beyond events, beyond trouble. But escape is its own trap." - David Campany
"Samoylova brings straight photography as close as it can come to forecasting a future. Her pictures are warning signs signaling that the myth of the flood is precariously close to becoming reality." -Gregory Eddi Jones, Lens Culture
Born in Moscow in 1984, Anastasia Samoylova moves between observational photography, studio practice and installation. She has exhibited at the Aperture Foundation, New York; the Griffin Museum of Photography, Boston; and at festivals in Brazil, Belgium, France, Holland, China, South Korea and Germany. Samoylova has published her work in Smithsonian Magazine, FOAM, Art Press, Monocle and Bloomberg Businessweek.
