Yola Monakhov Stockton, The Nature of Imitation, 2015

“While understanding photography as a craft as well as an art, she pushed against its limitations. A painting or a drawing, unlike a photograph, is not bound to its subject. In the studio, an artist is free to take creativity wherever it leads… For Yola, birds are a metaphor for her photography—for the ability to fly into freedom while remaining, at times, captured or tethered.”