Step inside the mind of the Russian born Moscow raised artist Yuliya (pronounced like Julia with a Y) Lanina and you enter a whimsical, monstrous, expressive world of figures with plant-like shapes, objects growing out of orifices, and twisted interpretations of childhood. It’s borderline unreal, merging physical space, other realms, plus some type of interzone, causing humans to go wild. There’s some kind of craziness in between -subconsciousness, danger, foreboding, but also whimsy. I felt like I fell through a trapdoor of surprises.
Her recent show Efflorescence was a short-term residency at Black Feather Gallery in east Austin that touched upon these themes and the inane. I spoke with her on closing day when the gallery was quiet and the paintings were being lined up to go home. We sat on a wooden bench drinking water in the heat of the afternoon.
“Much of my focus in this new work involves developing from a child to an adult. It’s a youngster phase when questions of gender and belonging are first addressed..”
I inquired, “What does it involve for you?” The author presents the woman with potato-head growth pointing to the painting. There’s a big mouth. And there’s a plant of sorts. It seems like a theme connects these? She remarks.
“Yes. I was also addressing abandonment that happens in childhood, I feel like, once you become of a certain age, go through your own process to understand who you are. It’s a personal experience, and a lot of times not understood or supported by parents, and you feel so alone.”
Efflorescence blends the figurative and symbolic in unsettling and deeply personal ways. There are giant mouths, potatoes with echoes of abandonment, plants that twist into memory. The work draws from her own adolescence, her children’s current teenage years, and a past inflected by familial disruption and early emotional solitude. “When I was 12, cancer struck my mom. My dad left for several years. I was very much alone.”
The work hovers in a liminal zone—between fantasy and corporeality, innocence and chaos, girlhood and gender fluidity. It’s narrative art driven by intuition, trauma, and deep emotional threads. “I’m reconnecting with parts of my past through my art,” she says. “It’s like deep embroidery. Sometimes you have to unravel the knots to see what’s underneath.”
Lanina who moved to the U.S. alone at age 16 from Moscow, carries a layered legacy. Her Jewish-Ukrainian and Russian ancestry weaves through her consciousness, often surfacing in abstract symbols and subconscious storytelling. She arrived in New York in 1990, navigating illness in the family, refugee status, and cultural reinvention. Now based in Austin for the past 14 years, she creates from a place of emotional excavation and narrative experimentation.
Her work has always been figurative—at first rooted in portraiture, later expanding into dreamlike forms. Her artistic signature can be summed up in five words: emotional, absurdist, figurative, expressive, and narrative.
Outside of visual art, she writes—though much of that writing remains hidden beneath her paintings, scrawled into the background and layered over with brushstrokes. “It’s there,” she smiles. “It’s for the piece itself, not always for the viewer.”
Yuliya is an interdisciplinary artist whose work bridges traditional media with new technologies, creating alternate realities rooted in sexuality, trauma, and identity. She has exhibited and performed extensively both nationally and internationally, including SXSW Interactive, Seoul Art Museum, SIGGRAPH Asia in Japan, the 798 Beijing Biennial, Cleveland Institute of Art, Patrick Hyde Gallery in London, the Blanton Museum in Austin, and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. She holds an. honorary citation from the New York State Assembly. Her animation, *Gefilte Fish*, won Best International Short Film at TAMU’s SHOMRON Film Festival.
What comes next? She plans to continue developing the Efflorescence series—digging further into its alternate reality, its layered emotions, and its capacity to speak both from and beyond the self.
Reach out to the artist on her website: www.yuliyalanina.com or by email to yuliyalanina@gmail.com
Upcoming events: https://designaustin.org/program/waterwork/