Samoyolova tells FISHEYE:
"I am an artist and photographer based in Miami. I work between observational photography, studio art, and installation.
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I grew up in Moscow, in one of its typical tall grey apartment buildings – not the most picturesque environment. Going out in nature was always a special occasion. Back in Moscow I also discovered online image sharing via Flickr and spent many hours in the day transcending the limits of physical space by looking at the vistas from remarkable faraway places. I started noticing patterns in how the most visited places get photographed, and how those images are subsequently digitally edited in a similar manner and I took an interest in those typologies. After a few years of thinking about it I started visualising my thoughts in physical form in 2013 when I made the first Landscape Sublime.
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I’m interested in the images that are meant to be used by others, so it’s not about appropriation in this case. In terms of definitions, I prefer the freedom of the avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s when artists freely moved between media and had no set titles.
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Initially I started using landscapes as an homage to the 17th century philosophers using examples from nature to illustrate the aesthetic categories as they were being formed, such as the picturesque, the beautiful, and the sublime.
But I was also drawn to landscape because it is intangible; it is neither an object, nor a person or a portrait; it is something that cannot be possessed, only in pictorial form. However, the real subject of the project is the act of photographing, and what it means when there are multiple images of the same kind produced by different people, not landscapes per se.
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I was originally trained in environmental design and painting and only came to photography later. My main influences are the “Amazons” of the Russian Avant-Garde: Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova. About a year into working on Landscape Sublime I realised how my cubist compositions were really a contemporary version of constructivism, the semi-abstract kaleidoscopic tableau reflective of the time as tumultuous as it was during those artists’ lives."