Summer Centerfold Artist Spotlight: Vexta

Vexta is a New York-based Australian artist whose psychedelic-informed practice explores mythology, consciousness, ecology, and transformation. Through murals, paintings, digital works, and immersive experiences, she creates visionary worlds where human figures dissolve into fungi, flora, geometry, and cosmic landscapes. Her work investigates creativity not simply as expression, but as a function of consciousness itself.

“Cosmic Dream” explores transformation and interconnectedness through luminous fungal forms, dream imagery, and visionary landscapes shaped by altered states, intuition, and deep creative flow.

Tell us about yourself. How did you become an artist?

I’m Yvette, but most people know me as Vexta. The name evolved from a nickname, Vex, with a little nod to my Czech heritage. I’m an Australian-born multidisciplinary artist from Sydney, now based in Brooklyn, New York.

I’ve been a professional artist for almost twenty years. I came up through the Street Art & Graffiti Art Movement in Melbourne in the 2000s, when the scene was exploding. I became one of the early prominent female artists in the movement, and that took me around the world — painting walls, exhibiting, becoming part of this incredible global community of artists.

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I didn’t come up through art school though. I’m autodidactic, and I actually studied journalism at university. Toward the end of my degree I had this very clear realization that I didn’t want to spend my life talking about what other people were creating. I needed to be creating myself.

So I taught myself. I put work up in the streets, painted walls with friends, experimented, traveled and developed my own visual language. Over the years that’s expanded into paintings, large-scale murals, digital art, augmented reality and immersive experiences, but that DIY street art ethos is still very much at the heart of how I work.

Was there a defining moment when you knew art would become your life’s work?

Honestly, I came to understand that art — creativity at large, and now consciousness — would be central to my life’s work through a deeply traumatic experience.

I lost my father when I was 18, in a house fire that also destroyed my childhood home. I was devastated. I spent the next couple of years living virtually off-grid, unsure how to find my way back to a world that had hurt me so deeply.

During that time, I began exploring consciousness and had some deeply transformative experiences with psilocybin. Those experiences reactivated my creativity. I realized I had one life to live. And when I looked back, art had actually been there all along, channeling through me like I was a receiver since I was tiny. I was drawing at two, making little books and paintings at four, shooting on film from six. My father was also deeply creative and worked for himself as a perfumer. After losing him, I think I began to understand creativity differently — not just as something I loved, but as something meaningful I could devote my life to.

I remember thinking: this is what I can give the world. This is worthy of my time and my life.

How has living in or around New York shaped your creative voice?

New York has intensified some of the contradictions that already existed in my work. For the last five years my studio was on the 69th floor of 3 World Trade Center. I’d create while storms moved across Manhattan and peregrine falcons flew past the windows. I live in one of the most constructed and accelerated environments on earth, yet I’m here painting birds, flowers, fungi, cosmic landscapes and reminders that we’re part of a much larger living system.

NYC is also full of incredibly inspired and driven people, and that creative community is electric to be around. It’s difficult not to be affected by the sheer amount of ambition, experimentation and creation happening around you.

Can you walk us through the story behind Cosmic Dream? What inspired you?

Cosmic Dream was originally created as a private commission, but the imagery grew out of themes I’d already been exploring for years around consciousness, nature, dreaming and transformation.

This piece comes from my long-running fascination with the relationship between our inner worlds and the natural world, and the way those thresholds can soften during psychedelic experiences. During those experiences, we can see and feel ourselves as part of, and not separate from, nature — which I find supremely comforting. This painting is my attempt to bring that understanding into visual form through my own lens.

It’s part of the reason I describe my art as psychedelic-informed rather than visionary. I’m translating my experiences through my own visual language, rather than trying to literally recreate what I’ve seen. I can’t stop thinking about the idea that consciousness is much stranger and more expansive than our everyday perception allows us to see. The title speaks to that liminal space between dreaming and waking, inner and outer worlds, individual consciousness and something much larger.

If someone could step inside this artwork, what would you hope they experience?

I hope it feels like stepping into a dream where the boundaries between yourself and everything around you have become porous. You’re tiny and enormous at the same time. You’re inside a garden, you are the garden, inside the cosmos, somewhere new and full of life. I’d want someone stepping into Cosmic Dream to experience that shift: microscopic and cosmic, individual and interconnected. Almost like remembering something you already knew but had forgotten.

How do you access your most creative state?

Flow states are key for me. I’ve spent years learning what gets me into that state where the self-conscious part of my mind goes quiet and I’m no longer standing outside the work, judging it while I make it. Sometimes I access that through painting itself, but also through walking, music, meditation, nature, dreams — microdosing helps too. I pay close attention to the conditions that let intuition get louder than the noise. At some point you have to surrender enough to let the force of creation move through you. When I’m really in that state it feels almost like a trance. Time disappears, I’m not thinking about myself anymore, I’m just completely inside the act of making.

Have altered states influenced your creative process?

Profoundly. Psychedelics have been part of my life for almost as long as art has, although I only began speaking publicly about that relationship relatively recently. One of my earliest psychedelic experiences happened in my early 20s. I saw rainbow fungi glowing and growing over absolutely everything, the entire landscape unfolding in front of me, while the night sky seemed to split open and reveal this incredibly complex architecture of energy behind ordinary reality. I had no artistic language for what I’d experienced at the time, but looking across almost twenty years of work now, I can see echoes of it in many pieces. Psychedelics aren’t the only altered states that influence me. Dreams, Dancing, meditation, nature and deep creative flow all influence me.

Nature appears to play an important role in your work. What draws you to organic forms like mushrooms, flowers and birds?

I’m fascinated by patterns that repeat across different scales: branching fractal systems, mycelial networks, coral, flowers, feathers, cells, galaxies, sacred geometry. Birds have a particular significance in my work because they move between worlds — between earth and sky — and flying embodies freedom to us land dwellers. Mushrooms occupy another kind of threshold, emerging from these vast, mostly invisible networks beneath our feet. I’m drawn to these forms aesthetically, but also symbolically. They remind us that we’re participating in systems much larger than ourselves, even when we can’t see them.

Are you someone who meticulously plans your compositions, or do you discover them as you work?

Both. For murals especially, there can be an enormous amount of planning — drawings, composition, scale, color, logistics.

But I always leave room to change my mind, respond to what’s around me and let new ideas emerge. With my newer, more abstract paintings I’m leaning into something more spontaneous. It feels really good.

What themes are you most interested in exploring next?

I’m increasingly curious about different theories of consciousness — animism, panpsychism, quantum theories — alongside perception, altered states, archetypes, dreams, mythology, and the relationship between inner transformation and the living world.

I’m especially drawn to what happens when art moves beyond being an object and becomes an experience — through projection, sound, augmented reality, immersive environments and participatory work that can actually shift someone’s state of perception.

I’m also about to return to Finland for an artist residency, spending time deep in the Finnish forest exploring meditation and creativity. I’m excited to see what comes out of giving myself that kind of concentrated time in nature to go deeper into these ideas.

Is there a dream project you’ve yet to create?

I’d love to create a large-scale immersive work that changes how someone feels in their body, how they perceive scale, how connected they feel to the living world when they leave. I have a project in mind and I’m hoping to find the right home for it. It’s about consciousness expressed through a character and narrative that brings together painting, moving image, sound, light, nature and altered perception. Something you don’t simply look at, but actually enter. A story you can live inside of.

What are you hoping people carry with them after spending time with your work?

I like to think of my art as similar to meditation — a place where you can connect with your intuition and feel into what comes up for you in the experience. Hopefully a new way of seeing themselves and the world around them.

If someone walks away seeing themselves or the world slightly differently, then the work has done something meaningful.