San Antonio, Texas; June 11, 2016—Polyglot Gallery is happy to announce a new collaboration

with San Antonio art space, Haus Collective, and invites the public for an

exhibition of recent work by Polyglot artist Yuliya Lanina. In furthering Haus Collective’s

mission to platform artistic and creative projects while strengthening the local arts community,

the show with Polyglot will highlight the new itinerant space and project by gallery director

Melanie Harris de Maycotte sharing the fresh, artistic perspective from Lanina who has never

exhibited in San Antonio, Texas.

Yuliya Lanina is a Russian-born American multimedia artist who received her MFA in animation

at Hunter College in New York City and has fused the lines between sculpture, painting and

animation for years with her mechanical sculptures, which, similar to her animations, rely on

music and moving images to tell her stories, always absent of dialogue. Her large animated

sculptures and animations have been shown worldwide. When the artist noticed that her

mechanical sculptures rarely ended up in the hands of private collectors because of their size,

Lanina was moved to create “music box” sizes as personal animated sculptures. The works on

view are a culmination of this effort, that involve herself, original musical scores by her husband

who is the accomplished composer and University of Texas musical composition professor,

Yevgeniy Sharlat, and fabrication by mechanical engineer Theodore Johnson.

Lanina’s paintings, animations and animatronic sculptures portray alternate realities that fuse

fantasy, femininity and humor together. Employing surreal imagery to simultaneously elicit

feelings of uneasiness and empathy, Lanina paints and collages bizarre characters that come to

life through mechanization, animation and music. Laninaʼs 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 whimsical 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. 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 founded 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 perhaps never fully understood.

Please join us at Haus Collective to experience these wonderful new inventions alongside the

artists on Saturday, June 11 from 6:00 to 8:30 PM. If you cannot make opening night, the show

will be open by appointment through September 2, 2016.