Yuliya Lanina: TALES WE TELL
August 19th - September 10th, 2016
Opening Reception
Friday August 19th, 2016
6:00pm to 8:00pm
Artist in attendance. Facebook event link HERE.
Poetry Reading
Sunday August 28th, 2016, 4:00pm
Poets Lisa Olstein, Cecily Parks, Susan Briante, and Taisia Kitaiskaia will read their poems written to accompany the specific works in this exhibit. Facebook event link HERE.
Performance: Not A Sad Tale
Saturday, September 10th, 2016, 6:00pm
A 20-minute performance about creation gone awry.
Performance & animation by Yuliya Lanina. Original music by Vladimir Rannev.
Facebook event link HERE.
Location
2832 E. MLK Jr. Blvd., Suite 111, Austin, TX 78702
CAMIBAart is pleased to present Tales We Tell, an exhibit of the newest body of artwork by Russian born Austinite Yuliya Lanina.
This exhibit features a series of paintings and small-scale mechanical sculptures based on popular folk tales. Collectively they examine the underlying moral messages of fairy tales and their effect on child’s psyche. Each sculpture is comprised of a painted wooden box with moving figures, as well as a wind-up mechanism that plays a melody custom-composed for each scene by composer Yevgeniy Sharlat.
In their modern version familiar to every child, Western fairy tales tend to sugar coat their original import. Yet even watered down, they speak of older men and women terrorizing young children, fathers leaving their children in the woods to die, and stepmothers feeding their husbands' biological children poisoned apples. The more graphic tales often contain an undercurrent of violence, incest, and sexual abuse, and even the milder ones teach children to be subordinate, to never question authority, to blame themselves for their misfortune, and accept their fate.
Included in this exhibit are poems by six poets, written specifically for each scene. Presented alongside each music box, some of these poems re-imagine the tales while others delve deeper into possible meanings and/or lessons.
This project is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development.
Mass-produced mechanical toys for children are ubiquitous – think crib mobiles that play Brahms’ lullaby. These quaint devices have been bringing much joy and enchantment to children since antiquity and possess a timeless quality. Yet we never think of them as vehicles for artistic expression and rarely value the craftsmanship and precision required to create the metal cylinder and the mechanism that coordinates music with motion. The rocking figures are usually naïve and kitschy; the music – soothing and innocent. However, there is an incomparable intimacy to the viewing experience – starting it up, watching a scene unfold, and sensing the vibrations of the plucked metal pins as they form a melody. Lanina uses the immediacy of that experience to show suggestive scenes accompanied by sweet and unfamiliar melodies.
Earning a BFA from Purchase College of Art & Design and a MFA from Hunter College in New York, Yuliya Lanina is an all round creative, with a wide range of awards, grants and scholarships recognizing her talent in film, performance, visual art and public art.
About the Poets:
Susan Briante, the poet of “Falls First”: The Kenyon Review calls her most recent book The Market Wonders “masterful at every turn.” She is also the author of the poetry collections Pioneers in the Study of Motion and Utopia Minus (an Academy of American Poets Notable Book of 2011), both from Ahsahta Press. Briante is the Associate Professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Arizona.
Taisia Kitaiskaia, the poet of “Thumbelina”: Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Crazyhorse, Pleiades, jubilat, Guernica, Gulf Coast, and Fence. She is the recipient of a Michener Center for Writers fellowship and the author of Literary Witches, forthcoming from Seal Press in Fall 2017.
Noelle Kocot, the poet of “Sleeping Beauty”: the author of seven books of poetry, she has won numerous awards for her work. She is a Poet Laureate of Pemberton Borough, New Jersey.
Jane Miller, the poet of“Whether the Goat is a Metaphor”: A visiting Poet at The University of Texas Michener Center; Miller is the recipient of a Wallace Award for Poetry, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Recent publications include Thunderbird, a book-length sequence of short poems from Copper Canyon Press, and Midnights, poetry and prose poems published with Saturnalia Press. Who Is Trixie the Trasher? And Other Questions is forthcoming.
Lisa Olstein, the poet of “Bremen”: LITTLE STRANGER is her most recent book of poems while LATE EMPIRE is her newest collection forthcoming in 2017. Olstein is a member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.
Cecily Parks, the poet of “Hansel and Gretel”: Author of the poetry collections Field Folly Snow (University of Georgia Press, 2008) and O'Nights (Alice James Books, 2015), and editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, 2016). Parks teaches at Texas State University.
Not a Sad Tale Performance:
This performance was originally presented to maximum capacity audiences during the 2016 Fusebox Festival. More information about the performance can be found on the artist's website here:
http://www.yuliyalanina.com/not-a-sad-tale/