Dress Rehearsal
2026
Dress Rehearsal is a multimedia installation exploring childhood dreams, creativity, love, and letting go. Paintings, sculptural figures, animation, sound, and mechanical elements come together to create a world inhabited by flower-headed figures, watchful trees, and hybrid creatures.
The installation considers how we carry our childhood selves into adulthood—the desires, fears, wounds, and imagined worlds that continue to live within us. Figures emerge from landscapes, flowers become eyes, and fragments of handwritten text move through the space, creating an environment somewhere between memory and the present.
Rather than treating childhood as something left behind, Dress Rehearsal asks what remains with us and what we eventually have to release. The exhibition moves between tenderness and unease, humor and loss, using imagination as a way of returning to experiences that can be difficult to approach directly.
As part of the exhibition, Lanina created the live performance And I Will Always Love You, in which she became one of the flower-headed characters from the installation and entered the world of the work. Developed in collaboration with choreographer Andrea Ariel and composer Aida Shirazi, the performance extended the installation through movement, costume, sound, and interaction with the artworks.
Dress Rehearsal was presented at grayDUCK Gallery in Austin, Texas, August 29–September 26, 2026. And I Will Always Love You was performed September 13, 2026.
Photos and videos by Magic Spoon Productions and Nick Berard
This project is supported in part by Austin Arts, Culture, Music and Entertainment.