In Now, voyager, Samoylova extends her photographic language into the territory of painting—and of reckoning. These hybrid works, formed by overlaying photographs with poured and dripped paint, inhabit a charged 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 within the shifting image of America.

Where earlier projects—FloodZone, Floridas, Image cities, and Atlantic coast—mapped how ideology and desire shape the visual landscape, Now, voyager turns inward. Here, paint moves across the photographic surface like weather: flooding, obscuring, illuminating. 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 amid roses; a roadside room bears the inscription, “Life is like photography, we develop”; a tattered flag and a graffitied sofa evoke private histories of longing and loss. Each piece becomes a meditation on what endures when ideals falter—how beauty and disillusionment coexist 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—a voyaging through the emotional and symbolic terrain of a country still in the process of defining itself.