Author: dig

“… redeem things from their associations” Jamaica Kincaid was on Cultivating Place, a podcast (July 2020).

“Memory is a gardener’s real palette; memory as it summons up the past, memory as it shapes the present, memory as it dictates the future.”

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“…carry it always

on my person, concealed, so

no one else would know but me.

That way they can’t steal it…”

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Floridas, Anastasia Samoylova. 19 January – 19 March 2022. Madera, 23.

“Sunshine state. Swampland paradise. Tourist aspiration. Political swing-state. Real estate racket. Refuge of excess. Sub-tropical fever dream. The place where image and reality become inseparable. With forms of nature and culture found nowhere else, Florida is unique. It is also among the most elusive and misunderstood of places.

Samoylova’s series Floridas documents it all in a layered portrait of contemporary Florida, while establishing a dialogue with the oeuvre of Walker Evans, the American photographer who documented the state between the 1930s and the 1970s. Like Evans, Samoylova moves between color and black and white, looking closely at the telling details in landscapes, cityscapes, people, objects and interiors that speak volumes about culture and social values. With her vivid bright images and sharp juxtapositions, Anastasia Samoylova offers a test for endurance to the iconic American narratives of the American Dream.

Floridas seems to exist on the thin border between observational documentary photography and a crafted photo-collage. It is the way the artist frames the shot of her subject of choice, in combination with her loaded depiction of color, that creates a slightly surreal atmosphere — none of which is staged. Posters, storefronts, signs, and utilitarian objects are meticulously observed as silent reminders of the character of American culture as a whole.

Press release, Sabrina Amrani Gallery.

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“… never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of his own children”

“… he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle’s” To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf.

“.. ALL OF A SUDDEN they run at each other once more and if you have a better phrase than like thundering elephants insert it here [ ].”

“… cotton canvas of heartbreaking, variegated stains.” The Autograph Man: A Novel (Vintage International), Zadie Smith

“… In practice this requires prodigious coordination, precision, and the best efforts of several human minds and that of a Univac 418.” The White Album: Essays, Joan Didion

“The sacred is of us, of this network, of our wandering, our errantry.” Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant

“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.” The measure of our lives : a gathering of wisdom, Toni Morrison

Just as there is a Keatsian sentence and a Shakespearean one, so Morrison made a sentence distinctly hers, abundant in compulsive, self-generating metaphor, as full of sub-clauses as a piece of 19th century presidential oratory, and always faithful to the central belief that narrative language—inconclusive, non-definitive, ambivalent, twisting, metaphorical narrative language, with its roots in oral culture—can offer a form of wisdom distinct from and in opposition to, as she put it, the “calcified language of the academy or the commodity-driven language of science.” Daughters of Toni: A Remembrance, Zadie Smith, reprinted as the foreword of The measure of our lives : a gathering of wisdom.