{"id":11132,"date":"2019-04-06T11:59:15","date_gmt":"2019-04-06T15:59:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=11132"},"modified":"2019-04-08T20:27:36","modified_gmt":"2019-04-09T00:27:36","slug":"yana-payusova","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2019\/04\/06\/yana-payusova\/","title":{"rendered":"Yana Payusova’s Imperfect, Everyday, Confident Women"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe have many years of recorded experience coming from the male perspective\u2014the aspirations, the desires, the struggles of what it\u2019s like to be a man. The female component to that is largely missing,\u201d Yana Payusova<\/a> said last year<\/a> of her ceramic vessels that are now on view in the exhibition \u201cRevolutions\u201d at Boston\u2019s Howard Yezerski Gallery<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis work is my attempt to record what it\u2019s like being a woman today,\u201d the Tucson-based artist said. \u201c\u2026These are everyday women. They\u2019re not \u2018perfect.\u2019 They are confident, however.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Yana<\/a>
Yana Payusova’s exhibition \u201cRevolutions\u201d at Boston\u2019s Howard Yezerski Gallery, March 22, 2019. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Payusova grew up in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in what was then the Soviet Union. \u201cSome of the most prevalent memories I have of my life in the USSR was standing in lines with my brother and mother,\u201d she writes on her website to describe \u201cThe Queue,\u201d a lineup of stoneware people that she began sculpting in 2015 to depict the community formed up to buy winter boots, bananas, bras or books.<\/p>\n

\"Yana<\/a>
Yana Payusova. (Photo: Nikita Payusov)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

She moved to the United States at age 17 and studied at Lake Forest College in Illinois and at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She then lived in Boston from 2006 to 2016, making narrative paintings crowded with little girls, a ballerina, couples, a woman with three breasts, a two-headed woman, a man with a TV for a head. Her characters roamed gritty cities, busy markets, stuffed kitchens. The scenes suggested uneasy, sordid late 20th-century urban fairy tales.<\/p>\n

Her new exhibition offers ceramic vessels, slowly rotating atop pedestals, and ceramic tiles hung up the wall. These picture book scenes done in red, black and white (echoes of Soviet graphics) are frank, and saucy, raw and bawdy.<\/p>\n