We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Julia Sinelnikova a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Julia, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s talk about innovation. What’s the most innovative thing you’ve done in your career?
When I started out in the New York art scene as a an eighteen year old, I was making realistic oil paintings and collage. I saw around me a quickly changing landscape marked by digital communications through new mediums, and I wanted to adapt my practice into something which took its place within this technology infused world. I expanded my collage practice through hand cutting, and in 2012 and 2013 I debuted some of my first immersive works, which crawled through aerial spaces and across walls while incorporating light, reflections and transparency. This grew into my “Crystal Fragments” series of immersive light sculptures, comprised of hand cut reflective films and my “Fairy Organs” light sculptures. Through this work I was able to exhibition sculptures both in galleries and in immersive music and theatre spaces. Some of my favorite projects from that time include a massive warehouse that I covered in projections and holographic sculptures for a 2015 Machinedrum concert at Brooklyn Night Bazaar’s old space with all of the relic arcade games throughout it. I was also invited to bring “Crystal Fragments” to a queer theatre experience directed by fashion designer Diego Montoya at Pace University that year, entitled “Enchanted Forest.” As I have continued to built out my immersive art practice, clients from the music industry have come to me independently seeking music videos. I have thus developed my cinematography and directing skills while filming musicians interacting within my immersive works.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
The center of my practice for the past decade or so has been public sculpture and immersive light art. I have completed commissions for the NYC Parks Department, the NYC Department of Transportation, and Gilbertsville Expressive Movement Sculpture Park in Upstate New York (a 45ft wide, permanent public sculpture in steel and acrylic). Inaugurated for a prominent park site this year. In Fall of 2022 I completed an over three month lobby installation for Arts Brookfield at Manhattan West in Midtown Manhattan, NYC titled “Intelligent Life.” This reflective, LED-powered work featured my hand-cut, transparent “Fairy Organs” sculptures illuminated by a twenty foot wide LED light array. This work focused on the mutable, transforming and LED-like cuttlefish and cephalopod organisms, a parallel to our light art technology. The sculpture used mostly recycled plastics, biodegradable films and organic material, in a nod to NYC’s river and ocean life.
These days my practice includes directing music videos which often includes my light art and sculpture work. This year two more of my projects for industry artists will be released, and four are already out on Youtube. I absolutely love filmmaking, portraiture and documenting music through innovative visuals. I feel the medium of directing music videos allows me to express my immersive practice to its height, as well as to illuminate my own music releases under the alias ORACLE666. I also DJ raves and events and create mixes, such as for Brooklyn’s Voluminous Arts and for Magnetic Magazine in 2022. One of my favorite gigs was an opening set for a Charli XCX performance at Wynwood Pride 2021. In 2022 I performed music and poetry, and also DJ’ed for our “HoloRealmz” installation at All Day I Dream festival in California for three nights.
Light is the fluid medium serving as the foundation of my artistic practice, determining how audiences interact with my immersive environments. Through my sculptures, performances, videos and installations, I use ever-evolving modular forms to transform space and examine perception. My intricately hand-cut light sculptures, the Fairy Organs, draw on the myths of the fairies and today’s malleability of human appearance in both physical form and online. I perform with these works as a character called “The Oracle,” who I see as giving birth to the living sculptures, channeling an archetypical woman sorceress.
My process involves documenting light patterns and nature through photography and video, and translating these into the basis for both hand-cut and welded sculptures brought to life through LEDs and projections. Through my visual art, performances, and music, I aim to create a womb-like setting for the audience’s healing and self-observation. Eastern European folk tales from my upbringing in Russia, which center the witch, filter heavily into my understanding of mysticism and storytelling. I see my sculptural objects as artifacts from a synthetic whole, an expansive performance ranging from research of natural moss patterns to poetry, light art and theatre.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
I think everyone in the arts and media fields, and people in general, can relate to the difficulty of getting through the changes to our economy and personal relationships through and after the Covid-19 lockdowns. For me, just before the pandemic, I was hoping to go on a music tour with a business partner, had been exhibiting work nonstop, and I was also just about to do my first major museum commission for Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) in April 2020 (this was postponed to Fall 2021). This time in my life was crucial: I had just begun to be able to afford an occasional studio assistant to expand my business. But everything ground to a half as myself and my family of friends took care of each other through the lockdowns from 2020 all the way through early 2022.
In September 2021 I finally presented my museum project for CAMH, a two week residency, installation and performance which occupied one of two floors of the museum. The performance event filled to capacity and the event was a success. During the show I felt the hollow absence of those lost in the pandemic, but I also felt uplifted to have the full support of museum staff as an artist for the first time in my life, producing my work.
Since my museum project, I have had a great couple of years, and have worked with amazing clients across sectors including crypto, music festivals and immersive art production companies. While I seek out as much public sculpture work for parks and cities as possible, I have been lucky enough to build a reputation where clients to look me up as a light artist, fabricator and music video director, and hire me. I am blessed to be able to do what I do. I just hope I can do more work in museum and university settings as well as public schools and parks, in order to bring diverse communities and youth together around art. This and creating a healing, transcendental experience with my immersive work is what is important to me.
Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?
If you read direct interviews with seminal artists and creators, from throughout history to today, you may find a common thread. An unapologetic refusal to collaborate on a normalizing agenda, an unshakeable commitment to the ideology and process behind their creative practice. Lately I have been enjoying going through Amanda Lepore’s video interviews as I write my first book, about my best friend and artist JJ Brine of Vector Gallery (may he Rest in Peace). The two were friends. Anyway, in Amanda’s interviews throughout a couple of decades on multiple TV and social media shows, you really see a frank and kind person who wanted to be seen for what she is, which is a feminine icon.
A couple of novelists who have influenced me a lot are N.K. Jemison and Haruki Murakami. I am admittedly a huge fan of sci-fi and cyberfuturism, so Jemison’s work in particular inspires me on that front in particular. In her worlds, like in Ursula K. LeGuin’s, gender roles, racial dynamics and political power are inverted to extremes in distant future versions of Earth and related worlds. I love how she explores environmentalism themes and provides a deep personal connection to her highly visual characters in her works, and I try to bring these transgressive themes and shifted power dynamics to my immersive art and video work. As a nonbinary artist I feel represented in her work. Murakami has always inspired me through magical realism, unafraid to pair light with darkness and give women on their own agenda the power to lead adventures all the way down the rabbit hole. His works examine the possibility of other modes of seeing through the everyday, to me.
I didn’t know if I was going to like it, but honestly my friend Paige Elkington’s podcast “My Friend Podcast” has been a blessing as working femme creative during the past few years. The hosts tackle topics from dating, politics, environmental science, the porn industry, just to name a few things, and they’ve interviewed a few musicians. I guess it’s just what the millennial in me needed.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.juliasinelnikova.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/or_acle
- Facebook: facebook.com/JuliaSinelnikovaArt
- Twitter: twitter.com/0r_acle
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHplJELpXP1vMsGqwu36W7A
- Other: vimeo.com/oracle666
Image Credits
1. Artist photo by Haley Varacallo, featuring my @oracle_wares handcut resin and silver jewelry. 2. “The Oracle” performance photographed by Wen-Han Chang 3. “Sky Shard” public sculpture photographed by Thomas Stuart Hall 4. “Skywave” public sculpture photographed by the artist 5. “Triquetra for Healing” public sculpture photographed by the artist 6. “Intelligent Life” public sculpture photographed by the artist 7. “Crystal Veil III” installation commission for Superfine Art Fair, photographed by the artist 8. “HoloRealmz” custom steel dome, performance and three day program for ADID Festival photographed by the artist 9. Performing as “The Oracle” at House of Yes “Full Moon” sold out event, photographed by Syra Sparkle