January 29–May 24, 2024
In 2016, Anastasia Samoylova (American, b. Soviet Union, b. 1984) moved to Miami, Florida. As she familiarized herself with the city through photography, a larger story began to unfold. The resulting body of work, FloodZone, explores what it looks like to live in the southern United States at a time when rising sea levels and hurricanes threaten the most prized locations with storm surges and coastal erosion.
Samoylova’s lyrical photographs are deceptive, drawing us in with a seemingly documentary promise of a palm-treed paradise. Their alluring color palette—filled with lush greens, azure blues, and pastel pinks—gives way to minute details that reveal decaying infrastructure, encroaching flora, and displaced fauna.
Both seductive and eerie, Samoylova’s images show us what it is to live at the edge of a climate crisis, a space where palm trees topple over onto buildings, where the patina of constant moisture results in dank mold on a freeway overpass, where the sky fills with golden hues after the storm. Somewhere between the artifice and the sobering reality lies the melancholy of living with the constant burden of climate anxiety.
The presentation of this exhibition is supported by an arts program grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from the Libby Kuhn Endowment Fund, as well as individual contributors.
We wish to thank HistoryMiami Museum, the Chrysler Museum of Art, and the George Eastman Museum for their support of the production of prints and texts for this exhibition.
Anastasia Samoylova (American, b. Soviet Union, b. 1984) is a Miami-based artist who moves between observational photography and studio art practice. Her work explores notions of environmentalism, consumerism and the picturesque. Recent exhibitions include Fundación Mapfre; C/O Berlin; Eastman Museum; Chrysler Museum of Art; The Photographer’s Gallery, London; and Kunst Haus Wien. In 2022 Samoylova was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Her work is in the collections at the Perez Art Museum, Miami; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; among others. Published monographs include Image Cities (Fundación Mapfre / Hatje Cantz, 2023), Floridas (Steidl, 2022) and FloodZone (Steidl, 2019).