NYAB Event - Yuliya Lanina "Honky-tonk Belles"

Yuliya Lanina "Honky-tonk Belles"

Figureworks

This event has ended.

Yuliya Lanina is a Russian-born American multimedia artist who splits her time between New York City and Austin, Texas. Having shown at Figureworks for many years, this solo exhibition highlights her most recent series of paintings and will also showcase her latest animatronic sculpture. This body of work portrays alternate realities that fuse fantasy, femininity, and humor.
Employing fanciful imagery from plants, animals and humans, Lanina’s characters simultaneously elicit feelings of uneasiness and empathy. Mostly female in gender, they are made of parts that are not supposed to go together and are derived from the artist’s own projections of nonsensical events and consequences. Painted on a stark white background, the primary isolated figure is accompanied by small winged creatures and quirky floral personas – all gesturing to get her attention. These unusual compositions celebrate feminine power and its connection to the mysterious, the beautiful, and the sensual. Lanina’s largest canvases are now introducing some intricately tattooed appendages that personalize and provide greater insight into these mysterious beings.
Lanina draws from many sources to create these characters. Though she often taps into Greek mythology with the half-human and half-animal demigods, she also relies on her personal roots with Russian fairy tales, which are filled with fantastic beings deeply rooted in paganism, mysticism, and symbolism. Her creatures and their stories move freely between logical and illogical, realistic and illusory, predictable and surprising, representing life that can only be lived, but never understood.
Bringing these two dimensional characters to life, Lanina has collaborated with Theodore Johnson (technical direction) and Yevgeniy Sharlat (musical score) to create “Honky-tonk Belles”, a festive, animatronic sculpture with characters from her paintings frolicking to an original soundtrack.