Artist Statement

Olivia Kays is a mixed media painter who works through the topics of power and confinement within American women’s history and her own experiences. Kays explores femininity through disempowerment and consumption. Reflecting on the nature of oppression generationally, personally, and ultimately as a whole.

Fashion started up again and was reemphasized post WWII, following a period of utilitarianism and conservationism. After WWII, the postwar economic boom made way for industrial growth and mass consumption. This also led to a new consumer class that started to shift away from expensive, custom made clothes to more accessible, ready-to-wear clothes. The new uptick in postwar production made clothing another article that was readily available for mass production and consumption. Most ads promoting consumerism were directed at women of all ages, utilizing shame and insecurity as the main advertising tactic. This linked identity and self image to appearance and material consumption.

Kays’ work exists within the contradiction of desire for belonging and resistance to conditions that define it. Her work examines how ideas of womanhood have been shaped, sold, and sustained through external systems of control and internalized expectations. She emphasizes and recontextualizes LIFE magazine imagery, models, and media from the 1950’s and 1960’s. Her work portrays American women’s history in a layered format, explores an emphasis, and allows her to be angry with the unequal distribution of power. This specific time period is important and integral because it aligns with the period that defined her grandmother’s prime. Her grandmother was her first introduction to femininity.

Kays integrates how ideals of femininity have been both constructed and consumed, in the sense of how they function as systems of control disguised as aspirations. The postwar period represents a milestone where femininity has always been a social expectation, but became much more emphasized as a marketed product. This moment continues to infect contemporary life and shapes how women ultimately internalize notions of beauty, value, and respectability.