Statement

Yana’s work reflects on the never-ending stages of becoming oneself in the greater, unknowable contexts of being seen and perceived, and the psychological horror of existing in an “undying” body. Drawing from experiences of existential paradoxes as a neurodivergent, nonbinary, queer person; Yana uses the figure as a tangible means of self projection and self identification.

Engaging and reinterpreting memories of growing up with a catholic background, Yana analyzes and subverts the faith’s construct of gender and performative, ritual archetypes in a narrative rewriting and reclamation of their own relationship with identity and selfhood. Themes of a fragmented self (explored through Traumerei System), always in conversation and conflict, are dramatized to explore the paradoxes of expected presentness in social roles and settings and consequently the reactive depersonalization and dissociation experienced through various stages of life. These themes are narrated through the bodies of each doll through their relations to one another, in a spiraling and incongruent manner to capture the feeling of foggy childhood and adolescent memories. The dolls have gained their own personhood in the context of one another and in the context of their nonexistent landscape.

Taking the narrative emotional honesty and character/archetypal depiction in contemporary Manga, the often irregular writing of "Girls' Media," and the compartmental, collection-based design of the play-set and the fashion doll, Yana juxtaposes aesthetic and theoretic aspects of this kind of ‘marketed, throwaway entertainment mediums’ with opulent material and visual textures. The bodies, doomed to exist forever in immortal porcelain, are made to house characters modeled after the most self destructive and inconsistent forms of self.