Yana Payusova

The sculptural installation, titled “The Queue,” is a long-term project that will eventually consist of one hundred individual sculptures. I find the concept of the ‘queue’ fascinating. I was born in Soviet Union and grew up there. Some of the most prevalent memories I have of my life in the USSR was standing in lines with my brother and mother. Since food, clothes and stuff in general were scarce, one had to ‘hunt’ for it even while living in a big city. Soviet women were accustomed to carrying shopping bags with them wherever they went because no one knew when one would stumble across a line of people waiting to buy something: winter boots, bananas, bras, books, etc. Since it usually took a bit of time (one time we waited for bananas for four hours), people would begin conversations with other people waiting in front or behind them, sometimes the conversation would turn into arguments and even physical fights. Women could not afford to stand in one line all day, so it was customary to ask a person in front of you to memorize your face, then leave to try to do the same in a long queue elsewhere, then go back and forth between the two (or three or four) lines to save time. I was twelve when the Soviet Union fell apart and things changes. The 90s were still very tough economically, as the people did not begin to trust that the things that suddenly appeared in the stores would still be there the next day and continued to buy everything up, afraid that the plethora of products was a temporary mirage.

As I became older, waiting in lines, any lines such as museums, the medical clinics, the theater became a sign of being a clueless looser. One was expected to hustle, maybe bribe the security guard, or pay extra for a doctor visit to skip the line altogether.  To this day, waiting in a queue in Russia is an active enterprise. One cannot relax and read a book hoping the line will just move along and eventually one’s turn will come. If one is foolish enough to become distracted, people will try and cut the line, claiming that they have ‘just one tiny question,’ or maintaining that they have been right there in front of you the entire time. One must concentrate and pay close attention. One must move forward and stand directly behind the person in front of you or else, that space will be quickly filled by a more agile, motivated individual.

In my travels I like to observe how people behave in lines. To me, it is as telltale of a culture as language and food. It is a thin veneer of a civilized society.  I relax while waiting in line in Europe or the USA, quietly read a book and politely pretend that I cannot hear the conversation going on directly in front of me. Every once in a while, for example waiting for a bus in Chinatown in New York City, I will be reminded once again of my Soviet days as a small old Chinese woman elbows me in the ribs to get to a better seat. I act annoyed and upset, but secretly, I feel nostalgic and smile quietly.

Queues and lineups also carry dark and historical significance. As I watch crowds of Syrian refugees on television, my mind immediately jumps to the images of the incarcerated Jews of World War II and any other displaced and marginalized peoples waiting and walking in line, carrying their worldly possessions.

In this installation, the reason the people stand in a queue is purposefully left ambiguous. Who are these people? What are they waiting for? Where are they going? These are the questions I want my viewer to wonder about.

Every person is a character. Moreover, everyone slowly morphs into different characters throughout their lives. Some larger-than-life, some ultra ordinary, every character is unique and only around for a period of time. Our personalities, passions, expressions, quirks, and habits become etched in our faces, sculpting the history of our lives. The older people become, the more apparent the life that someone has led. Were they drinkers, laughers, smokers, frowners, dreamers? Were they gregarious, serious, reserved, outlandish? We draw immediate conclusions from first impressions. With familiarity, faces change within our own eyes, and we continually forget how they looked previously. A sculpted character shares this progression, changing, as it grows familiar, continually reflecting our own projections.

This painted sculptural installation is the captured essence of thirty souls. frozen in time, mime-like in their expressions, further additions to the landscape of characters to be encountered.

From the press release:

Sculpted with a whimsical touch, each of the titular thirty souls exude a sense of character and essentiality. The bold, undulating lines of the black underglaze enhance this sentiment of playfulness against the earthy color and texture of the stoneware. The multiplicity of the sculptures creates an installation that echoes our own understanding of community; a cluster of individuals whose existence works in relation and reaction to one another. Here, Payusova blurs the line between portraiture and mythology to create a truly unique manner of expressing selfhood. 

This painting pays homage to Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights," specifically to the most intriguing middle panel of the famous triptych. I have spent an entire year working on this piece. I wanted to flatten the perspective to create an almost wallpaper-like effect. 

“Two-Headed Tales” is a narrative-based art installation loosely based on real and imagined memories of growing up in Leningrad, USSR, during the fall of the Soviet Union. The story is told from the perspective of a little girl and her ambiguously imaginary friend. After an argument, the girl’s younger brother disappears into the subway underground. In order to find him, she and her doppelganger embark on a quest where they encounter such surreal characters as a bureaucrat with the power to slow down time, a snoop who trades sweets for stories of misfortune, a double-headed meteorologist who predicts the weather by reading tea leaves, and a corrupt apparatchik who works as a collector of broken hearts. The protagonist must navigate this threatening world where nothing is as it seems, and every character has a self-serving agenda, in order to find her brother before he disappears forever.

Blurring the boundary between real and the fantastic, symbolic and allegorical characters populate this narrative, revealing historically commonplace situations perceived through the imagination of a child. Philosophical insights revealed through childhood innocence create an under-layer and subtle complexity.   The childhood vision and imagination create a way of peering behind the curtain of complex social situations, revealing the true essence of what is often nonsensical activity that adults engage in without conscious thought.   In this way, an avenue for reexamination of human behavior is opened.

Kunstkamera is a cabinet of curiosities museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Cabinets of curiosities (popular in Renaissance Europe) were collections of objects whose categorical boundaries were yet to be defined. They were used as a way to preserve natural and human curiosities and rarities (naturalia).   The Kunstkammer was regarded as a microcosm, a theater of the world, a memory theater.

The idea of a domestic, indoor, microscopic reproduction of the world is fascinating, as is the almost maniacal desire of mankind to collect, stuff away, categorize, classify, alphabetize, catalogue and display life and nature frozen in time, properly labeled and named. Natural made artificial.

The collectors of these objects act as the curators, deciding what is important and relevant in describing the world.   I often feel like such a collector/curator: observing and studying people and personalities around me, keeping mental notes and drawing sketches. Watching people’s body language and gestures, I collect them and stuff them away. In my paintings they are brought back to life, are cast into scenes playing out various scenarios, following their own internal logic and desires.

It is my observable universe, my microcosm, the people and surroundings of my past, present and imagination. They all live and inhabit my canvases. This curated display of particular cultural types is also perhaps a form of propaganda.   The artist becomes a puppeteer, in charge of presenting the outside reality in a particular perspective, only picking objects to serve ones own agenda and discarding the ones that confuse it.  The artist presents images and personalities from the outside world, whether they existed or not, and so becomes the curator of memories.

What is of particular interest to me in this body of work is the effortless way in which memory/memories become modified, altered, corrected, and transformed altogether. I find it fascinating that one can create a memory of an event not actually experienced. I find it intriguing that I have a memory of my parents’ first date because it was described to me by my mother. However, the memory shifts its shape slightly when the story is narrated by my father. When I became an adult and was more readily able to interpret the subtleties of my parents’ stories, the real (?) and far less romantic reasons for the marriage became apparent. The wedding I once visualized (and the details I vividly imagined) turned out never to have happened. But what happens to the physicality of these old memories? How is it that memory can become collectivized and commoditized? I’m interested in the glitches, the in-betweens of memories.

-Yana Payusova
 

The overlapping of myth and memory are the basis for Yana Payusova’s densely packed, semi-autobiographical paintings. They humorously depict the absurdity and frustrations of her experiences growing up in St. Petersburg, Russia in the 1980s and 1990s. Combining stories and photographs from her childhood, with tales told to her by her parents, Payusova uses a variety of techniques to suggest the way family history is distorted by time and memory. Filled with narrative scenarios, where events are presented almost like graphic novels without the text, the artist presents different incidents from her stories simultaneously, conflating both time and space. The paintings blend the styles and symbols of folk art, Russian icons, graphic poster art, illustration, and comics, and reflect Payusova’s cultural heritage and her training in traditional Russian realist painting. Her distortions of scale and anatomy (figures with no hands or six legs) are emblematic of the role different characters play in the artist’s wildly-imaginative dramas.

-Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Director of Curatorial Affairs, DeCordova Museum

In the process of growing up, one inevitably suppresses childhood perceptions and replaces them with new ‘adult’ perceptions. The way in which a child thinks about things, looks at things, and questions phenomenon, gets suppressed and buried deep into the recesses of the adult conscious mind. These perceptions become secrets of the past, carefully concealed from the secret’s originator. In this series, I am trying to recover the secrets of my childhood. When I look at old family photographs, I can often remember the day when a photo was taken. I use the details that the camera captured (such as clothing, interior spaces, expressions of people’s faces, etc.) to recall and reactivate the five-year-old version of myself and to remember what was it that made me giggle, made my heart race or stir my imagination. I try to go back in time and rewire my thinking process to remember the way I used to be and use these photographs to recover the secrets of my own mind. As a method of counteracting the process in which my adult perceptions replace those of childhood, I paint childhood 'reclamations' of memory on top of photographed scenes of my past.

The artwork of Yana Payusova can not be viewed simply on a visceral level without being asked to see the social commentary and to decipher numerous embedded symbolic elements. This particular body of work was inspired by Payusova’s experience of studying and listening to personal stories of incarcerated teenagers (14-21 year-old boys) at Lebedeva and Kolpino prisons in St. Petersburg. Many of them became the victims of the economic chaos that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union. Searching for an answer to a profound question of “What is a society’s role in labeling these young men as criminals, convicts, felons and sinners?” is the philosophical underpinning of Payusova’s work.

In order to answer this question, she constructs a visual language where the traditional black and white photographic imagery is mixed with the iconographic and symbolic elements of Russian Christian Orthodox culture from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. Combining the realistic quality of digital imagery (young mens’ faces) with a visionary quality of painting (the overall imagery) allows the intricate and quintessentially Russian elements to assume an avant-garde design. She strives to unite the traditional and nonconformist to transform the one-dimensional meaning into a purely modern composition. Every painting becomes a poetic invitation into the subjects’ life, thoughts, pain and sufferings.

Payusova’s work, with its strong imagery, the play of consciousness and her unique juxtaposition of images, immediately brings the viewer into the world of these young men. Through the codified symbols of the Russian society, Russian Orthodox Church and the prison rhetoric, Payusova combines this heavy symbology with direct representation of the young mens’ faces to remind us of a complexity of life. It is this juxtaposition between their personal narrative and society’s reaction to them that allows one to search for an answer to this fundamental question of society’s judgments of saints, sinners and martyrs. In her own words: “What we fail to see are the reasons, the incentives for those kids to commit the crimes.”

Narrating the personal story of these teenagers, Payusova manages to deliver this complex sociological notion in an intimate and personal style. In the end, she presents us with the world that is not only filled with pain and loneliness, but also with poetry and lyricism. It is this melding of the symbolism and reality that carry with it greater power and deeper meaning. In her own words: “To shock or to insult the viewer is not my intention. I want them to consider what is more important - an icon or: a human life”.
-Angelica Semmelbauer, Mimi Ferzt Gallery
 

This body of work was inspired by my experience volunteering at prisons in St. Petersburg, Russia. I was primarily working with incarcerated teenagers (14-21 year old boys), who are victims of the economic chaos that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union. These kids either grew up on the streets or came from highly dysfunctional families. I spent a year getting to know these people, their stories, and their personal histories. In retrospect, I started thinking of how we, as society, label these kids: criminals, convicts, crooks, felons, villains, sinners. What we often fail to see are the reasons, the incentives for these kids to commit crime.

I am exploring eternal concepts of saintliness, sins, holiness, and martyrdom. For this purpose, I have constructed a visual language where the traditional black and white photographic imagery is mixed with the painted iconographic and symbolic elements of Russian Christian Orthodox culture. By merging and mixing these referents, my intention is to call into question how we define and judge saints and sinners and what factors contribute to the creation of both.

As the project evolved, I began to see the prison community as mirroring and mimicking the organization of general Russian society. Further along, I also began noticing similarities between prison and church cultures.  Both are structured by rigid hierarchies and employ secret languages known only to a privileged few.  Russian Orthodox Church uses an old form of Slavic Russian in its services and writings. The prisoners also use a secret language, one that has been passed verbally. Similar to the American hip-hop vernacular, Russia’s “blatnaya fenya” has infiltrated the popular culture; it is considered “cool” to speak the lingo of the inmates from the “zone.”

Both church and prison cultures use complicated visual language, codified through use of certain symbols and the positioning on the pictorial plane.  Orthodox iconography was not intended to be confusing or elitist; rather, the visual language had lost its original clarity and simplicity as the centuries passed. Prisoners invented their own visual language through tattooing the body. In this case, the pictorial plane becomes the body.

Visually entangling the histories and parallels of church and prison cultures, I wish to challenge the branding of present-day sinners.
-Yana Payusova

This piece consists of eight small panels. I first became interested in the idea of multiples comprising one larger piece after studying the altars or iconostasis in Russian churches. One of the key elements of the traditional five-tiered iconostasis is known as the Deesis Tier (Row). Christ usually appears in the center panel and is surrounded by his Mother, St. John the Baptist, archangels Gabriel and Michael, the prophets, the patriarchs, and other saints (the length of the Deesis Tier depends on the size and wealth of the church) praying that Christ be merciful when judging the world. Coincidentally, at that time I was researching the symbolism of prison tattoos and thought that it may be interesting to create a row of portraits using the subjects’ hands. I employed the use of tattooed ‘perstni’ (rings) to depict elements of my subjects’ biographies, as conveyed by the symbols tattooed on their hands (although these are painted on the virgin hands/canvas of non-prisoners).