Yana Payusova

is your halo on too tight?, 2023-2024

Is Your Halo On Too Tight? examines the seductive power of propaganda and the ways political imagery transforms ideology into belief. Drawing from Soviet and contemporary Russian propaganda, I combine archival photographs, historical symbols, and hand-painted imagery with the visual languages of religious iconography, folk art, and popular print culture.

The works consider how political leaders are transformed into larger-than-life figures through repetition, spectacle, devotion, and myth. Familiar images are disrupted through scale, ornament, distortion, and juxtaposition, creating a space where reverence and absurdity coexist.

The series emerges from my experience growing up in the Soviet Union, where official images and narratives were woven into everyday life. Rather than treating propaganda as a relic of the past, I consider how its visual strategies persist in contemporary culture - how images construct heroes and villains, shape collective memory, and make particular versions of reality feel inevitable.

The title introduces a deliberately irreverent question: when does belief become so powerful that it begins to distort perception? Through the collision of historical imagery, political symbolism, and visual seduction, the work explores the unstable boundary between faith and ideology, devotion and submission, history and myth.

Is Your Halo On Too Tight? has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including:

Conduit Gallery, Dallas, Texas — solo exhibition

C.R.E.T.A. Rome, Rome, Italy — three-person exhibition

63rd Faenza Prize – International Biennial of Contemporary Art Ceramics, MIC Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche, Faenza, Italy

In Apparatus, I created a porcelain Rube Goldberg machine—an intentionally over-engineered contraption designed to perform a simple task in an unnecessarily complex way, in this case, spreading propaganda. The project incorporates various stages, each representing different methods of disseminating information, progressing incrementally one small step at a time.

In Newtonian mechanics, the principle of causality suggests a direct, one-to-one relationship between cause and effect. This means that each force has a predictable and calculable outcome. Similarly, in Apparatus, each component in the chain of events triggers the next, mimicking the often subtle and gradual ways in which propaganda spreads through society, one seemingly insignificant action leading to larger, cumulative effects.

In Decoy I, II, and III, the surfaces of the three duck decoys are covered with images from old Soviet propaganda posters. The red decoy features imagery promoting the friendship between the former Soviet republics of Russia and Ukraine. The white decoy highlights the dangers of religious fanaticism, while the blue decoy focuses on the perils of prioritizing money. Beneath the surface, hidden Big Brother hands flash various gestures, subtly subverting the official message of the sculptures and indicating that things aren't as they seem.

Finally, in Za Rodinu (For Motherland), I draw parallels between the old and new realities of information dissemination. One side listens at the walls, referencing the old Soviet saying, "even the walls have ears," while the other side reflects the modern reality of information being blasted through a megaphone.