Yuliya Lanina is a Russian- born American multimedia artist who splits her time between New York City and Austin. Her paintings on canvas and paper, animations and animatronic sculptures portray alternate realities that fuse fantasy, femininity, and humor.

Employing grotesque imagery to simultaneously elicit feelings of uneasiness and empathy, Lanina paints and collages bizarre characters that come to life through mechanization, animation, and music. Lanina's characters, mostly female in gender, are made of parts that are not supposed to go together. They act out absurd situations in a somewhat blasé, carefree and humorous manner. These characters are the artist's own projections of nonsensical events and their consequences. Their malformed features and parts illustrate internalized trauma and torment while still engaging in the life-affirming celebration of feminine power and its connection to the mysterious, the beautiful, and the sensual.

The scenarios acted out by Lanina's characters reference various subconscious myths and tales that are repeated and reinterpreted across cultures and generations. Lanina frequently taps into Greek mythology, where half-human and half-animal or bird creatures act out fables. The artist is also influenced by Russian fairy tales, which are filled with fantastic beings and deeply rooted in paganism, mysticism, and symbolism.

Lanina's interbred 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.