Natural Transcendence: In Conversation

Join us for a virtual conversation with artists Colleen Plumb, Anastasia Samoylova and Antonia Wright, in conjunction with the exhibition Natural Transcendence. Moderated by the curator, Rhonda Mitrani from The Screening Room Miami, these artists will share about their practices and their relationship to nature as a participant, silent observer and critical eye and discuss their process in creating artwork that reflects an ethereal sensibility toward the natural elements that surround us.

Artist Bios

Colleen Plumb, born and raised in Chicago, makes photographs, videos, and installations investigating contradictory relationships humans have with nonhuman animals. Her work explores the way animals in captivity function as symbols of persistent colonial thinking, that a striving for human domination over nature has been normalized, and that consumption masks as curiosity. Plumb’s work sheds light on abnormal behaviors of captive animals in order to bring attention to implicit values of society as a whole, particularly those that perpetuate power imbalance and tyranny of artifice. One of her recent projects reflects on the interconnectedness of ecological systems—forests, oceans, air—linked with photographs of her two daughters as they engage in landscape, made over the past 20 years. Plumb’s work is held in several permanent collections and has been widely exhibited and published. Her first photography monograph, Animals Are Outside Today (Radius Books, 2011) critically documents ambivalent dispositions towards animals. Plumb’s recent photography book, Thirty Times a Minute (Radius 2020), examines the plight of captive elephants with contributing essays by nine experts working in legal, ethics, and scientific fields. Plumb lives in Chicago and has taught photography and video at Columbia College Chicago since 1999.

Anastasia Samoylova is a Russian-American artist who moves between observational photography, studio practice and installation. By utilizing tools and strategies related to digital media and commercial photography, her work explores notions of environmentalism, consumerism and the picturesque. In 2021 her ongoing project FloodZone will be presented in solo exhibitions at the Multimedia Art Museum Moscow, as part of the Photography Biennale; Orlando Museum of Art, as part of the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art; HistoryMiami Museum; The Print Center; and Chrysler Museum of Art. The book of the project was published by Steidl in 2019.

Antonia Wright is a Cuban-American artist born in Miami, Florida. Wright received her MFA in Poetry from The New School in New York, New York and completed studies at the International Center of Photography in General Studies in Photography, New York, New York. Through video, performance, photography, and sculpture, Wright responds to extremes of emotion, control, and violence as it relates to systems of power in society. Wright often uses the human body as a principal element in her work. Select solo exhibitions include those at Spinello Projects, Locust Projects, Luis de Jesus Gallery Los Angeles, MoCA North Miami, and Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, and at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Scottsdale, Arizona. Select group exhibitions include those at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, Florida, The Faena Arts Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse in Miami, Florida, and The National Gallery of Art in Nassau, Bahamas. Residencies include Pioneer Works in New York, Leipzig International Art Program in Germany and Oolite Arts, Miami, Florida. Wright recently won a 2019-2020 South Florida Cultural Consortium Award, the Ellies 2020 Creator Award, and was a CINTAS Foundation Fellowship finalist awarded to artists with Cuban heritage. Wright’s work has been presented in publications including The New York Times, Artforum’s “Critics’ Picks,” Art in America, Hyperallergic, i-D, New York Magazine, Daily News, Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, and The Art Newspaper.