About

Artist Statement

Yana Payusova makes paintings, sculptures, and installations that explore how power, ideology, and cultural belief shape intimate experience. Drawing from her experience growing up in the Soviet Union during its collapse and aftermath, she transforms bodies, domestic objects, gestures, folklore, and historical imagery into psychologically and politically charged narratives.

Her work moves between the intimate and the theatrical, combining humor, absurdity, beauty, and unease. Familiar images and objects are altered, recontextualized, and brought into unexpected relationships, revealing the beliefs and expectations embedded within them.

Payusova is particularly interested in the unstable space between personal memory and official history—how stories are constructed, inherited, revised, and transformed over time. Across her practice, historical imagery becomes myth, everyday gestures become symbolic, and objects become carriers of memory and cultural meaning. Through these transformations, her work asks how larger systems of power enter everyday life and become part of how we see, remember, behave, and understand ourselves.

BIO

Yana Payusova is a contemporary artist working across painting, sculpture, and installation. Born in Leningrad, USSR, she grew up during the final years of the Soviet Union and its collapse before immigrating to the United States at seventeen. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts Practices from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Payusova's work has been exhibited internationally at institutions and exhibitions including the Museu de Ceràmica de l’Alcora, Spain; Ceramic Avenue Art Gallery, Jingdezhen, China; Santa Joana Museum, Portugal; Conduit Gallery, Dallas; New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taiwan; and the 63rd Premio Faenza, Italy. Her work has been presented at the Gyeonggi Ceramics Biennale in South Korea and is held in the permanent collections of the DeCordova Museum, Boston Public Library, Museu de Ceràmica de l'Alcora, and Crocker Art Museum.

She has participated in residencies at Guldagergaard International Ceramic Research Center and C.R.E.T.A. Rome and was commissioned by Meow Wolf for a permanent installation at The Real Unreal in Grapevine, Texas.

Payusova is Associate Professor of Practice and FYE Program Chair at the University of Arizona School of Art.