My work transforms personal experience into emotionally charged environments where sculpture, drawing, animation, writing, and performance come together. Rooted in autobiography yet shaped by mythology, memory, dreams, and imagination, I create worlds where inner experiences take physical form.

Dress Rehearsal explores transformation, the ways we carry the past, reconstruct ourselves, and imagine who we can become. A rehearsal is a place of possibility; A space to practice, experiment, fail, and begin again. It is not the final performance, but a moment of becoming.

This exhibition explores the space between childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience, vulnerability and resilience. Through humor, fantasy, and unexpected imagined worlds, I revisit the longing for wholeness and the ways we learn to care for the wounded parts of ourselves and those we love.

Writing has become an important material in my practice. I transform private journal entries into physical forms by cutting, layering, collaging, and wrapping them into objects, costumes, and environments. What begins as an intimate act of reflection is transformed into a shared experience with memory, vulnerability, and imagination. Through sculpture, animation, and performance, I create encounters where the familiar becomes strange, where something wounded can be cared for, and where vulnerability can become a source of connection.

Bio

Yuliya Lanina is an interdisciplinary artist whose work bridges traditional media with new technologies to transform autobiography, mythology, and memory into emotionally charged narratives. Working across sculpture, drawing, animation, installation, and performance, she creates psychologically rich experiences that invite viewers to navigate the space between beauty and discomfort, intimacy and spectacle.

Lanina has exhibited and performed extensively throughout the United States and internationally, including the Blanton Museum of Art, Seoul Art Museum, SIGGRAPH Asia, the 798 Beijing Biennial, Patrick Heide Gallery (London), Vienna MuseumsQuartier, and SXSW Interactive. She has created large-scale public and site-specific works, including Blossom Gazes, a permanent installation commissioned by the City of Austin, as well as projection-based works for the New York City HighLine, Seaholm Intake Facility, the San Antonio RiverWalk, and the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn.

Her honors include fellowships and residencies from Fulbright, Headlands Center for the Arts, Yaddo, Artpace, Marble House Project, and The Puffin Foundation. Her work has been featured in Bloomberg News, The Brooklyn Rail, Feminist Studies, Glasstire, and Austin Chronicle. Lanina holds an MFA from Hunter College and is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Department of Arts and Entertainment Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin.

A huge thank you to Langosta Atómica Hecho en Cuernavaca.

This project is supported in part by Austin Arts, Culture, Music and Entertainment.