Yulya Valuy x Dasha Avdeeva — CalArts Post Grad Show Y25

Yulya Valuy x Dasha Avdeeva

(Art and Technology MFA 25)
https://yulyavaluy.com/,
https://dahakaumresh.wixsite.com/umreshakadashik

Boxxed, 2024 – 2025

Yulya Valuy and Dasha Avdeeva’s collaborative installation Boxxed pairs a 39" x 31" oil painting with 24 small canvases arranged in a grid, each containing a hollowed space filled with real female hair shaped into a cube. Yulya’s sculptural grid uses 100% Real Virgin Slavic Human Hair Bulk Extension 613 Blonde Hair 12a Weaving For Braiding Unprocessed No Weft — marketed as luxury but often sourced from poorer Eastern European women who dye their hair blonde and sell it for extra cash. In the beauty industry, ‘Slavic’ functions less as a lived identity and more as a brand, promising aspirational, rare beauty, exotic whiteness, and authenticity. These markers promise a form of belonging through transformation. For the artists — best friends, and both Siberian with naturally darker hair and stated (with humor) desires to appear blonde — the work embodies being simultaneously the hidden donor whose body is commodified and the consumer desiring a product that is a pure cultural construct. The hair cubes manifest the ways bodies, hair, skin become compartmentalized, standardized, packaged for consumption — transformed from living growth into geometric units that deny their organic origins, marketed through racialized categories that obscure the economic exploitation underlying beauty industries.

The collaboration between Valuy and Avdeeva investigates how identity, media, and the body blur into unrealistic forms. The painting uses assemblage technique to examine how identity is built from multiple sources — personal memory, visual culture, beauty industry marketing, and friendship. The painting reimagines childhood and recent photographs of Yulya, layering them with fragments from film, pornography, and art from the duo’s shared memories. Valuy’s interdisciplinary practice, which began with graffiti addressing propaganda and surveillance in Saint Petersburg, has evolved into mixed media and installation investigating cultural and identity formation trends within information flows. Avdeeva’s painting addresses emotional and intimate entanglement with media and visual culture, exploring identity formation and perception, the tension between self and absorbed visual elements.

PROXY CHIMERA ORACLE

CalArts 2025