NOW VOYAGER
Anastasia Samoylova
On View: Nov 30, 2025 - Jan 30, 2026
In Now, Voyager, Anastasia Samoylova extends her photographic language into the territory of painting - and of reckoning. These hybrid works, made from photographs overlaid with poured and dripped paint, inhabit a space between document and abstraction, between the seen and the felt. Taking its title from Walt Whitman’s exhortation: “Now, Voyager, sail thou forth to seek and find” - the series follows the artist’s ongoing search for meaning in the shifting image of America.
Samoylova’s earlier projects: FloodZone, Floridas, Image Cities, and Atlantic Coast, mapped how ideology and desire shape the visible landscape. In Now, Voyager, that landscape turns inward. Paint moves across the photographic surface like weather: flooding, concealing, revealing. The gesture transforms the image into something volatile and alive, a metaphor for both renewal and erasure.
The works oscillate between lushness and abrasion: a peacock’s plume dissolves into a storm of white pigment; a veteran salutes from a garden of roses; a roadside room bears the scrawl “Life is like photography, we develop”; a tattered flag and a graffitied sofa evoke private histories of loss and longing. Each piece becomes a meditation on what endures when ideals decay; how beauty, violence, and faith persist in the same frame.
In dialogue with Rauschenberg, Richter, and Polke, Samoylova’s overpainted photographs resist both cynicism and nostalgia. They propose instead a form of seeing that is restless and searching - an act of voyaging through the emotional terrain of a country still defining itself.