Larysa Myers
Fractured self
Imagine yourself as a mosaic - each shard a memory, each fragment a story. Identity is fragmented, nonlinear, imperfect. Through collage, artists reassemble past and present into visual diaries, embracing the messiness of memory to reveal a self that is ever-evolving, resilient, and beautifully incomplete.
View SeriesLarysa Myers
Introducing Larysa Myers—an artist whose work weaves together myth, memory, and personal experience. Myers brings a rich cultural perspective to her practice, shaped by a former career in finance and a deep engagement with textile design.
Now based in Beacon, NY, and informed by the transformative experience of motherhood, her art explores the dualities that define us: the domestic and the wild, nurturing and independence, seen and unseen. Each piece invites reflection on the quiet, untold stories threaded through our lives.
Episode
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"It often reflects on ideals of motherhood or femininity and its dualities. The body is reduced to a female archetype as the form is silhouetted and manipulated. Settings are domestic, wild, mundane, and fantastical, each opening into different parts of the psyche and identity."
- Laryssa Myers
The Storyteller, 2024
Standing at the threshold of the infinite, The Storyteller captures a quiet yet potent moment of revelation. A silhouetted figure, almost feline in grace, gazes out at a star-speckled expanse beyond parted curtains. The painting draws us into a narrative suspended between past and future, inviting us to wonder: what stories lie beyond this veil? Myers’ exploration of interiority shines here, blending the vastness of the cosmos with the intimacy of a single gaze, hinting that the stories we tell often begin within ourselves.
The Mess, 2024
In The Mess, Larysa Myers weaves a striking visual metaphor for the tangled, ineffable nature of memory and human connection. Cloaked in deep blues, the painting invites us into a space both intimate and cosmic. At its center, two shadowed hands hover over an unruly web of lines—part snarl, part tapestry. Are they trying to untangle the chaos or weaving it further? This ambiguity lies at the heart of Myers’ practice, reflecting the layered, often contradictory act of remembering and making meaning.
The piece feels tactile, almost alive, as though the threads might shift beneath our gaze. These looping lines could be ties to the past—fragile yet tenacious, a map of relationships, choices, and histories. Or perhaps they represent interior struggles: the tension between what we inherit and what we shape anew, between legacy and reinvention.
Rooted in her broader exploration of motherhood, myth, and domesticity, The Mess holds a quiet universality. The hands could be hers—or ours. They might belong to generations past, endlessly shaping and reshaping stories through touch and toil. Myers often draws from dualities in her life: the precision of craft versus the chaos of nature, the personal versus the mythical. Here, those tensions converge in a moment suspended between action and reflection.
In the context of our theme, the painting becomes a meditation on how memory—personal and collective—refuses to be neat or linear. It twists and knots, holding traces of joy and grief, clarity and confusion. And yet, there’s beauty in the mess: a chance to confront it, to sift through it, to find meaning in its tangled threads. Like storytelling itself, The Mess reminds us that our histories are never simple—but always worth untangling.
"My paintings and drawings explore personal history through the universal and the cyclical, the mythological and the contemporary."
- Larysa Myers
The Perfectionist, 2020
A spiral shell replaces the figure’s head, rooted in a lush tapestry of flora. In The Perfectionist, Myers crafts an intricate meditation on self-containment and aspiration. The precision of the pattern and the symmetry of buttons evoke the desire for order, yet the organic chaos of the surrounding foliage reminds us that perfection is elusive, ever tangled with nature’s unpredictability. This piece resonates with Myers’ broader inquiries into the entanglement of identity, memory, and the natural world—a reminder that growth, like perfection, is always layered and evolving.
“I work with Japanese paper when drawing, they are very delicate and vulnerable-feeling (...) I like the back and forth repetitive motion of weaving. Drawing is like this for me and that repetitive mark making dispels anxiety."
- Larysa Myers
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More Works By: Larysa Myers