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Installation at Howard Yezerski Gallery

 

Yana Payusova

Kunstkamera

September 10 - October 12, 2010

opening reception: Friday, September 10th 6 - 8pm

Kunstkamera is a Cabinet of Curiosities museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Cabinets of Curiosities 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. The Kunstkammer was regarded as a microcosm, a memory theater. In the upcoming exhibition, Kunstkamera, opening Friday September 10th, Yana Payusova draws from her own cultural "memory theater" in creating works which give insight into her formative upbringing in the USSR.
Both playful and macabre, the paintings become complex overlapping visual narratives, embedded with symbolic elements. Interested in the cataloguing effect of human memory, and the way in which the mind alters and transforms remembered events, Payusova creates a series that visually combines time, space, memory and imagination in an attempt to recreate the sensations and observations that have shaped both her past and present.

The artist acts as the curator of her memories: “observing and studying people and personalities… keeping mental notes and drawing sketches. Watching people’s body language and gestures”.
In the paintings these memories are brought back to life to play out “various scenarios, following their own internal logic and desires”.

Yana Payusova was born in 1979 in Leningrad, USSR. Classically trained as a painter at the St. Petersburg Fine Art Lyceé, she later immigrated to the US. She received her MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2006. Payusova exhibits both nationally and internationally, including recent venues at Galerie Caprice Horn (Berlin, Germany), DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Mimi Ferzt Gallery (New York, NY) and the International Center of Bethlehem (Bethlehem, Palestine).

For further information please contact Howard Yezerski Gallery 617.262.0550 Tuesday - Saturday 10-5:30pm