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Project
Competition
Juror's Choice Selected by Lesley Martin, Aperture
Yana Payusova,
Boulder, CO
Russian Prison Series
This body of work was inspired by my experience of working at male prisons
in St. Petersburg, Russia. I was primarily working with incarcerated teenagers
(14-21 year old boys) -- victims of the economic chaos that followed the
breakup of the Soviet Union. It is common knowledge that Russia is quite
corrupted; the same could be said about its correctional system and facilities.
The vast majority of people who end up in prisons are the ones who cannot
afford to buy their way out. 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 fail to see are the reasons, the incentives for those kids to
commit the crimes.
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 iconographic and
symbolic elements of Russian Christian Orthodox culture from the twelfth
to fifteenth centuries. 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 contemporary clergy has
inherited this language; its roots go as far back as ninth century, when
Russia was influenced by the Byzantine Empire to adopt Christianity as
its official religion. The prisoners also use a secret language, one developed
by the GULAG inmates and passed down verbally. Similar to the American
hip-hop vernacular, Russia “blat” language 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 their 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 person’s body. Depending on where the tattoo is situated, the
meaning of the symbol shifts, and sometimes drastically. The tattoo language
is very sophisticated. For example, if one prisoner were to look at another
prisoner’s tattooed hands, he would be able to gather the other
inmate’s name, reason for conviction, personal history and political
beliefs.
I understand that borrowing the iconic imagery may be offensive to some
Orthodox Christians. As iconoclastic as my paintings may be perceived,
I think of them in terms of challenging the traditional beliefs, customs
and values rather than mocking sacred imagery or disrespecting religious
artifacts. 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. Could
a fourteen-year-old boy, abused by his family, scarred by his social environment,
be considered a martyr? Visually entangling these notions, I wish to challenge
the branding of a present day sinner.
This project is going to consist of thirteen paintings and will be accompanied
by a digitally animated video piece. In this video, one of the icons will
be fully animated. The stylized figures of saints and angels will engage
in a dialog with a teenage convict. Through this dialog, I am hoping to
bridge the gap that inevitably evolved because I am a Russian artist working
in the United States. I am aware that an American audience will not understand
much of the symbolism and text embedded in the paintings.
Bio: I was trained as a painter in an intensive six-year program at the
Leningrad Art Lyceé in Leningrad, Soviet Union, within the traditions
of the Russian Realism. I've received my bachelor's degree in fine arts
from Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, IL. Currently I am a MFA candidate
at University of Colorado at Boulder.
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