Artist Yulla Faun Vega sits on a couch in her living room, mixing paint for a base coat of pink on a wooden board with moulding around the edge.
“So I've lived in 45 houses in my lifetime,” she said. “So some of the pieces are reclaimed doors and panels from houses.”
The impermanence of her surroundings has a deep impact on Vega’s painting.
“I think it also applies to my subject matter,” she said. “What is a home and transitional homelessness and going from place to place to place to place, and always having new cabinets and new doors.”
For Vega, there are many layers to the art she is working on.
“The piece itself is going to be an outline of one of the previous homes I've lived in, and then layers of the rooms inside of it,” she said.
In her basement, lies a 4x2 finished painting that she produced.
“This one's made on a door and the outside trim is wallpaper,” she said of the work. “The piece itself has little blue squares on it, kind of like a grid paper. It's as if someone's trying to plan what their next space is going to be. And we have three different houses layered onto this one, and they're all translucent, so you can see into each space at the same time.”
Personal symbolism is embedded inside many of Vega’s works.
“We have a little sleeping deer in the corner, and to me, that represents a sort of sense of safety,” she said. “Toward the right, we have one that looks like it was shot and hung up on the wall.”
The Oklahoma state bird is a repeated theme throughout Vega’s work. She rips a brown paper bag to start drawing and cut birds out of.
“I am making a stencil of a scissor-tailed flycatcher in flight, which to me, represents a sense of hope that the next place is going to be better.”
Transience is at the crux of Vega’s subject matter.
“I call it flight safety and how not to drown,” she said. “How to navigate the housing crisis without fully drowning and becoming homeless.”
The origins of this work come from a sort of practical darkness she observed.
“That came about when I was thinking about how someone I knew had stayed in an abusive situation and didn't leave their home to find a safer one, and so maybe for that person, that was easier for them to navigate than the current housing market,” she said.
With some spray paint, Vega heads out the back door to put some more paint on her repurposed cabinet door that is now taking on the colors of the sunset.
“This one is red, and I don't necessarily think that red is a sunset color,” she said. “Sunrise colors most of the time, but sometimes I like to throw in an extra unexpected color.”
Despite the heavy thoughts, her paint streaks seem carefree and the colors are bright.
“The clouds aren't necessarily realistic looking, and that's because I wanted to keep an element of play in there, and so I'll make shapes that maybe a child might make as a cloud,” she said.
She contrasts her darker themes with a lighter color palette to intentionally lighten the mood.
“Just because I don't want the whole topic to be like so sad that you can't get past the fact that you can still have fun in these situations and enjoy parts of it,” she said.
