The nature of imitation

By looking closely at living birds in the field through the materiality of colour film and studio props, The Nature of Imitation explores the connection between seeing, knowing, and wanting. 
In detailed, hyper-real photographs that recall the decorative drawings of natural history, the work evokes the delicate experience of holding a bird against traditions of landscape representation in religious iconography, Renaissance frescoes and tapestries, and Modernist painting and sculpture. Through collaborations with scientists, ecologists, and naturalists on the Massachusetts coast, at universities and research centers across the Northeast of the United States and in Costa Rica, Yola Monakhov Stockton gained access to wild birds captured for banding before their release, and those captive in labs. Alongside photographs taken in orchards, gardens, and on wooded paths, the work cultivates a vocabulary of techniques that attend to the process of making, such as light leaks on film, objects acting as masks inside the camera, or evidence of equipment, paper backdrops, and cut-out shapes. The field becomes an improvised studio, a living picture plane. The series revisits positivist modes of photographic representation against a contemporary and personal awareness of the fragility of place.

Yola Monakhov Stockton makes work that deals with landscape and literature, the qualities of boundaries and constraints, data gathering, and the materiality of photography. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with solo shows at the Alice Austen House Museum, The Aviary Gallery, Old Dominion University, Sasha Wolf Gallery, and Smith College; and in the collection of the Smith College Museum of Art and numerous private collections. Her work has been featured in Harper's Bazaar, Esquire, Time, Marie Claire, Newsweek and The New York Times, and she has been a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.