lilliya scarlett reid

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interview

by OLIVIER ZAHM

photography by ANNA GASKELL

 

Based in the wilds of Montana, young artist, filmmaker, and actor Lilliya Scarlett Reid embraces the eerie, the obscure, and the fantastical. She brings to life macabre, erotic scenes of violence, with ghosts, landscapes, car crashes, girls, and animals.

In this issue, she models for the Alessandra Rich F/W 2024-25 Collection.

 

OLIVIER ZAHM — Where are you from, Lilliya?

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — I’m from Montana. I grew up in the town I am in right now, Livingston. It’s a Western ranching and railway town. It’s gorgeous and idyllic, surrounded by mountains and rivers.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Has this landscape influenced your psyche?

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — Definitely. This is the place I know the best. It influences much of my writing and my artwork and filmmaking. It’s kind of at the core of my work and my inspiration.

OLIVIER ZAHM — So, you like to go back there and work all alone?

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — Yes. I’m writing a script right now, and I came out here because I wanted some quiet. I sometimes end up feeling a bit more isolated in Los Angeles than I do here, where I’m actually isolated. I prefer to be here, where I can just really focus and spend all day at war with myself.

OLIVIER ZAHM — How do you approach your paintings? Can you tell me about them?

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — I hate talking about my artwork, but I will try my best. I’ll give you breadcrumbs. [Laughs]

OLIVIER ZAHM — But it’s something you have to express, right? It comes from the soul.

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — Yes, I’ll attempt to. So, I’ve been painting for a very long time. I’m only 23, so it’s not that long, but I’ve been painting for as long as I can remember. For almost seven years, I was painting portraits, and they were sort of these grotesque faces I would imagine. They had violent mouths, and the skin was peeling off, and they were like Abstract Expressionist portraits of people just from my mind or my dreams. So, I did that for a very long time. And what happens when you make something for a while is that you realize you’re making the same thing over and over again, and it doesn’t excite you anymore. I think I had exercised that exact form — the portrait — and I was stuck. I go crazy if I don’t make things, and so I knew I needed to make something that excited me. And I love Robert Crumb — he’s such an amazing cartoonist. He does a lot of ridiculous and sexually comedic cartoons. I believe he’s still alive, and he lives in France. Where all good men escape.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Would you call your work dark comedy?

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — I started making these kinds of erotic cartoon jokes. I’d draw women or myself in these ridiculous situations. And a lot of them felt like pornographic, cartoonish situations that you imagine yourself in or men imagine you in, these weird versions of sex. And then I wanted to paint cars and car crashes. I was scared of driving for a long time, and so I started to draw cars in amorphous, bizarre forms. And they have giant penises ejaculating onto these women who are readily waiting, legs akimbo, ready to receive. And the comedy of it was something I was really drawn to — because they’re very dark. I think darkness is what can make things very funny. Sometimes the best jokes are dark jokes.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Is this part of your own fantasy?

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — It’s not my fantasy. It’s not supposed to be a statement of that. When I think about my artwork, it’s about putting things together that you’re not supposed to see together. So, even if it’s as ridiculous as a dismembered woman and a wolf with an erection waiting — they are things you’re not supposed to see. And I put them on the page. For me, it feels powerful. I guess it makes me feel like an authority, where I can put these things together.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Do you see art as magic?

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — Yeah. It’s interesting that you approached me about this magic issue because my drawings have taken a turn recently, where I’ve started to use Masonic and religious imagery. These are things that you’re not supposed to put on the page, these powerful symbols, but I got the itch, and I just put them there. Like the idea of driving in the middle of the night on a highway in Montana, the Crazy Mountains and the moon in the background, and there’s a meeting of roadkill and a dismembered woman. It’s mystical and surreal in a way.

OLIVIER ZAHM — What do you want to capture in your drawings and paintings?

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — Someone said something about my work once that really struck me. They said, “It’s like you got into the car and never made it home.” It’s this feeling of lost or borrowed time that I want to capture in paintings and drawings.

OLIVIER ZAHM — It’s so David Lynch and so American: you get into a car, and you don’t know where you will end up — maybe in another dimension, which is the dark side of the same place or the same world. The car is a vehicle, the body is a vehicle, the mind is a vehicle … and you go somewhere. You also painted these amazing flowers. I’m totally obsessed with your flower paintings, but you only did a few. You should do more — they’re really beautiful.

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — I was just commissioned to do another flower painting. But the reason behind the flower paintings is very funny. I was working at a restaurant, and I saw a gallerist, and he said: “You know what? I don’t like your paintings. They’re disgusting. I hate looking at them.” And he goes, “Why don’t you put all of that violence into painting flowers?”

OLIVIER ZAHM — Good point. [Laughs]

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — Sure. But I was kind of pissed off about it. And then I got home, and I had been stuck with my drawings at that point, so I said: “All right, I’m going to paint flowers.” So, I made him “fuck you flowers.” And I made a few of them. I love flowers, and I love nature, but right now, I need to keep pushing it all the way, which is by doing my surreal, disgusting drawings until it goes into something else. But of course, I had to make them with bloody bulbs and roots.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Did you study art?

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — I did a year of art school, and then I dropped out. I have not gone to college.

OLIVIER ZAHM — So, you are a wild child?

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — Yes, for better or worse. I love learning, and I feel like I’m always learning, no matter what. I’m always reading. I’m always talking to people. I love talking to people who have nothing to do with anything that I do and asking them questions because I think it’s far more interesting than myself. That’s how I taught myself.

OLIVIER ZAHM — You read a lot, and you write. That’s the most difficult thing — writing stories. So, you decided to be a filmmaker and to write your own stories and your own films. And you’ve already written and made a short movie.

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — It’s called Bits. It’s a short film that premiered at South by Southwest this March. I’ve always been interested in fiction and telling tall tales. My father’s an amazing writer, and I told him I wanted to write. And he said, “Well, if you want to write, you have to fucking read.”

OLIVIER ZAHM — How do you structure a film? Do you start with the character or with the story?

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — I think the character comes first. I find a character who fascinates me. I am drawn to the stories of people who make questionable decisions. I always make questionable decisions, and that’s how I can write about them. I usually choose female characters as my protagonists because it’s very unique to be a woman. There’s a present quality that we have.

OLIVIER ZAHM — You prefer female characters?

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — I wish I was great at writing about men. My film, for example, takes place in my hometown, and it’s about a woman who goes on a date with a guy who’s a serial killer, but she doesn’t know that. And they’re halfway through having sex, and he kicks her out of his house, and then she finds out all this information about him through other people in town, and she becomes even more curious. Then the news comes out that they’ve found bodies on his property — dead women. And she becomes obsessed and fixated on his victims and becomes jealous because she wasn’t killed, and she wonders what they had that she doesn’t. That to her was the ultimate rejection. And so, she then tries to share his paraphilia and desire. In the end, she tries to become just as bad as him. That’s something that I find very interesting in the psyche — trying to get even. I think I have envied men. I have penis envy! That’s part of my paintings.

OLIVIER ZAHM — And also the abuse of power. Western civilization is killing the planet, killing the animals. Everything is organized crime. That’s optimistic. [Laughs]

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — I don’t know if it’s organized. [Laughs]

OLIVIER ZAHM — Maybe it’s disorganized crime.

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — I wish everything was like The Sopranos. That would be awesome. But unfortunately, I feel this chaos generates a domino effect.

OLIVIER ZAHM — How do you see art? Is art, for a young woman and a young artist like you, a way of protecting yourself from this chaos, or a way of responding to this chaos because you’re from a generation that’s facing disaster? A political disaster in America, an ecological disaster… If you look around, there’s not so much hope. So, is art self-defense?

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — I think people get lost with art because they think it needs to make sense. For me, the process of making art is not to protect myself from chaos. Maybe it’s a way for me to get some energy out that I have to get out, or else who knows — I’d be in a gutter somewhere. But I have to make my work, and I don’t know why. And it’s not trying to send a message. I don’t believe in art having to have a message. I don’t believe in everything being some kind of representation. The most important thing to me is that it makes me feel something, whether hatred or love or heartbreak. As long as it has an effect on me, I think it’s successful.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Do you remember Freaks? It’s one of the most beautiful silent movies. We’re all freaks, at the end of the day.

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — We’re all freaks. I think life would be boring if that weren’t the case.

OLIVIER ZAHM — We’re part of the freak family because we’re all singular people who reject the norm. There is no norm.

LILLIYA SCARLETT REID — I think that, as humans, even if we choose to stay on the straight and narrow, get a normal job, go to college, and have kids and a family. No matter what, human nature is far too interesting and complex for the chaos not to leak out somewhere. You can try to plug all of the holes, but there’s going to be some area of your life where it seeps out.

Even someone who appears to have done the most predictable thing with their life, made the safest choices, there’s something there. Something is boiling and will come out to some degree, at some point.

END