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Pre-pubescent Bosch
Carla Gannis
The Mechanical Dolls of Yuliya Lanina were on view at Scope Miami 2007
Yuliya Lanina, Lullaby. Courtesy of the artist.Art Basel Miami 2007 and its numerous satellite fairs, must be one of the largest "moveable art feasts" to date. However, the abundance of fun and sun influenced my art picks counter-intuitively. The works I found most intriguing exposed the dark and heavy underbelly of a culture on an obsessive-compulsive binge. Such creative inclinations have been characterized by luminaries like Robert Storr and Suzanne Anker as the "new grotesque" in art. At Scope Miami, Yuliya Lanina, a young Brooklyn-based artist, presented one of the freshest incarnations of the "new grotesque" impulse. Lanina’s simultaneously creepy and whimsical Mechanical Doll series was on view at ADA Contemporary Fine Art, a Richmond-based gallery owned and operated by the enthusiastic dealer/artist John Pollard. This was the second year ADA showed with Scope Miami, a more established fair that maintains an independent and experimental aesthetic.
The grotesque in mainstream media and within the arts has certainly been on the rise over the past several years. Television shows like Nip/Tuck (originally based in Miami) and Dexter possess a broad cultural appeal. Subversive works by the Chapman Brothers and the absurdist, animatronic installations of Peter Caine have raised the pitch even higher in the visual arts, as they probe our attraction and repulsion to dolls and automatons as representations of the human condition.
In the past three years Lanina has moved from cast sculpture and painting to readymades and animatronics. Like the Chapmans and Caine, there is an irreverence and dark humor that runs throughout Lanina’s work. She delivers a punked out, pre-pubescent "Boschian" universe, one for the morally relativistic set. Distinctions between good and evil are ambiguous, and Lanina’s fantastically original freakshow of chimeras animate at the flip of a switch. Rabbit, a dolled-up bunny with human-like hands and lips wears a polka-dotted dress and comes to life by kicking up her furry leg. She then lifts her dress and with a vacant stare flashes her curvaceous female breasts at the viewer. In Lullaby, red curtains part to reveal a post-apocalyptic tableau. A gnarled and sooty tree, sprouting eye flowers, grows out of the center of the stage. Nested behind the tree hipster mutants and refugees mechanically carry on rituals of life.
Lanina has recently commented, “I explore cultural identity and sexuality through images of perverse, yet innocent dolls. Taking cute and cuddly readymades and turning them into fetishistic objects, I construct my work on the intensity of coexistence of opposite extremes. It remains open to a multiplicity of interpretations.”
In earlier works Lanina dealt overtly with female body politics and themes of loss and renewal—often specifically in relation to the loss of her mother. She has broadened the scope of her work over the past few years. More voices now accompany her feminist voice. Violence, neglect, addictions, and non-conformity are reflected through the prism of a fractured human identity. Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein bears some resemblance to Lanina’s creative process, as Lanina disassembles and reassembles her "dead" doll parts to bring to life a frightful yet naive creation.
Lanina inhabits psychic space both with Shelley and her famous mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft who in 1792 wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women. At 38 Wollstonecraft died leaving behind a ten-day-old daughter who would become Mary Shelley. Shelley chose fiction over political treatise. Her creature, made of an amalgam of disparate parts, remains a powerful symbol of the body and of the lost and bewildered child waking up to a world of adult turmoil.
