Biography

Lani is a scamp. She likes to run and duck and hide and play. Ever since she was a child, her life has been in motion. She has no permanent place of residence. She lives where she is, and goes where she might also like to live... if only for a time. The diversity of people and places she encounters is what entertains and inspires her vagrant life and art star dreams. For many years, art has been one of the only consistent elements of Lani's existence, helping her to make sense of the exhilarating yet exhausting consequences of her ever-changing environments.

Lani began her life on a large piece of land in the interior of British Columbia, Canada, where she had endless hours of uninterrupted freedom to explore the fields and forests that surrounded her. Even as a child she was able to cover great distances on the backs of her ponnies. Although Lani grew up isolated within an expansive piece of land in a cabin without electricity or running water, she was also born into a tight and eclectic community and was traveling before she could remember.

The majority of Lani's family resides in the Bay Area, California, where she has also passed a portion of every year of her life. California became a place to share the warmth of family, as well as the beauty of the ocean and natural environment and partake in an urban culture not readily available through the small towns of British Columbia. Because Lani has an extensive family, that would prefer to do nothing other than share time at the beach, Lani has found a love of the ocean that has been carried with her to many places of this continent and others. In recent years, this love of warmth and water has led to an ultimate balance of love, work and play, and Lani now spends many months of the year surfing and painting in Baja. Mexico.

On an artistic level, Lani's lifestyle visually unfolds as a sexually appealing fantasy world depicting elements of the natural world as well as exuding stylistic features of media and urban culture. In considering how images are used, meanings are conveyed and space is virtualized within commercialized environments, Lani attempts to create highly captivating images in order to re-create a general idea of female identity. She paints "characters", and yet feels a desperate need to provide each figure with a unique quality and personality through the careful consideration given to eyes and facial expressions. Nonetheless, a definite duality is present in the work. Despite their apparent individuality, the characters also evoke a struggle of identity and image in both the sexualized and assertive elements of their postures and expressions. The girls are an assertion of independence as well as a proclamation to an undeniable vulnerability. In this way, Lani hopes to make subtle critique on the ways in which women are influenced by, and view themselves in relation to the world.

Lani  Imre