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Represented By/ (Works available at...): l'Autre Galerie Montreal, Quebec Education: 2000: Independent Study under USF Professors Bradlee Shanks and Victoria Hirt in experimental printmaking and photo-based processes Selected Solo Exhibitions:
The Instigators Trifecta Gallery, Las Vegas, NV March 2007 Selected Invitational Exhibitions:
Second Hand Smoke and Mirrors: 2 Artist Show (with Brandt Peters) L'Autre Galerie, Montreal, Quebec. Spring 2007 Selected Juried Exhibitions: All Florida Juried Exhibition 2001. Salt Creek Galleries, St. Petersburg, FL Exhibitions Curated: Last Exit to Dreamland. An Exhibition of Artist Couples: Kathie Olivas & Brandt Elling Peters, Jim Houser & Rebecca Westcott, Liz McGrath & Morgan Slade, Lynn & John Whipple, and Plankton Art. Covivant Gallery, Tampa, FL. June 11-July 11, 2004 Collaborations: 2000-20001: Bask, Brandt Elling Peters, Michael Peters, Cat Thompson Awards/ honors: 2002: "Best Princess of Pop" Weekly Planet "Best of the Bay 2002" Reviews/ Press: Freaks R Us BY MARY MULHERN 5-18-05 Would this painting match my couch? This question, cynically maligned in the art world, seems to me a fair opening query in response to the paintings of Kathie Olivas and Brandt Peters currently on view at Matthews Fine Art Gallery. Or more to the point, who will buy this cartoon grotesquery? Their paintings are scaled to fit any living room wall, and priced affordably. The carnival imagery is recognizable, the colors bright. You could hang one over the couch knowing that while watching television, your back would be turned to the monstrous yet cuddly portraits and their disturbing associations. Both artists work in a familiar style - the baby doll, stuffed toy, cartoon, creep show school - rooted in pop art, surrealism, illustration and animation. Names that the artists find inadequate but are used to describe the style are "Lowbrow," "Underground" and "Pop-Surrealism." I suggest Puerealism, although it's not so catchy. Weeble-ish animals and children populate Olivas' canvases. These overstuffed bunnies, boys and girls may have started out cute, but trussed up in muzzles and dunce caps, limbless in droopy-footed pajamas, mouths zipped or bolted shut, they are ultimately repulsive. The characters' utter repression - speechless and immobilized - does not manage to inspire sympathy. They are players in a nursery freak show engendering voyeuristic guilt, suggesting fetishism and a dangerous hint of abuse. The boys and girls' ineffectual victimhood raises the specter of sadomasochism, yet their weirdness leaves the viewer an out. We don't want to get it. We'll just look through the peephole at the solitary confinement cell of the subconscious. This is brave territory. Olivas illustrates ancient taboos in a seductive and childlike style. You may not want to go there but it is an oddly familiar place. Peters' muscular and active illustrations retain a cartoon quality that provides more levity and storytelling. While anxiety pervades his pictures in the weaponry of tanks, swords and hooks, the characters remain on the animated page rather than invading your psyche. Peters' macho men and pin-up girls retain the humor and exaggeration of classic comic illustration. Olivas and Peters met at Ybor City's goth club The Castle four years ago. Peters, the son of two artists, grew up in Los Angeles and has worked in the film industry as an illustrator and animator. Olivas received her MFA from USF and managed a gallery where she showed and collaborated with a group of "Lowbrow" Tampa artists. The two were living and working together within a month of meeting, and married within a year. Not only do they live and make art together, but they have day jobs creating sets and props for the same theme park design company. The connection between their art predated their meeting, but has deepened in the work they have created since. Recurrent characters, disguises and props are shared by the two. The storytelling aspect of their commercial work spills into the paintings, in their resemblance to flipbooks or animation cells. Their work, similar in illustrative technique and pop culture references, has fed on their partnership; a number of works in the current show are collaborations. Olivas explains, "Our characters are alter egos for us. We have also created characters that represent each other in a way." Peters' homage to his wife is "Miss Content," a girl with a Minnie Mouse hair bow and shoes (on eight motion-blurred legs) with a hook for one hand and parrot puppet in the other. "The boy figure in my new work is based on Brandt," she says. The boy's head is cut in layers, revealing bird's eggs, or topped with a dunce cap and propellered beanie. Bolted plates or zippers silence him. Peters and Olivas both use nostalgia to draw the viewer into their work. Brandt's cartoon style, and both artists' toys and characters are of the 1930s era, rather than the 1980s of their own childhood, giving the nostalgia a remove of several generations. The vintage imagery escapes sentimentality through the artists' torturous transformations. Yet kitsch acts as a barrier to their true experience and expression of contemporary culture - we're looking at a past that is not directly theirs. The "Underground" label is hardly accurate at a time when cartoon imagery and pop culture permeate the International art scene and the commercial print, video and film market. This kind of edgy work is filling the galleries of New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo. Even cutesy anime is showing a darker side in the work of young Japanese artists. But an Olivas puppy or a Peters bat punctures the retro-pop label with a humor that is pitch black. Matthews Gallery owner Albert Burruezo tells me the works are selling. We'll see if Tampa Bay can offer enough of a market, and enough edge, to keep these artists. MARY.MULHERN@WEEKLYPLANET.COM Artists Lay Bare Their Troubled Souls In New Exhibit Published: May 5, 2005 At least according to the title of their new show. ``We're both focusing on these traveling figures that are kind of self-portraits,'' Olivas said. ``Like they're not really comfortable in their own skin.'' ``We are all kind of chronically wandering around seeking social acceptance,'' Peters said. ``It becomes more evident every day in the work environment and the social environment.'' ``The bunny typically represents fear and the sword is a defense mechanism,'' Peters said. Pittsburg City Paper: Art Preview 2/17/2005 Kid You Not The corruption of the precious continues with Cadaverous Mob, paintings and sculptures by Kathie Olivas at Blue Ruin Gallery. In this playground of pudgy tots, bewildered dogs and irate cats, Olivas seeks to undermine the idea of “cute,” taking hallmarks of the term and forcing us to rethink our associations. Her brood, human and non-human alike, is adorned with party frocks, conical headpieces -- maybe birthday hats and maybe dunce caps -- and beanies with whirring propellers. The fun ends there. Amid the trappings of games and gaiety, there’s darkness. Mouths are obliterated behind bear traps or vicious zippers, legs have been replaced by striped-stockinged, blade-like appendages, and instruments of torture supplant dolls and firetrucks. It requires some contemplation to register just how many things are wrong with this picture, and once it starts to sink in it drops like lead. Conjoined girls grasping candy in hooks and teary boys sniffling beneath pig noses are brought to something like life in the discolored tints of a favorite storybook left too often in the sun. The portraits isolate their subjects, the only background suggesting the faded and meaningless drop of a third-grade school picture. Olivas’ children are isolated by more than lack of context, and this is what separates them from the hordes of spooky children haunting gallery walls. Ryden’s kiddies, baptized in blood or wreaking their own carnage, maintain self-possession. Nara’s imps frown at the onlooker with middle digit directed skyward. The bad seeds that have followed are proud and rebellious, in control. Olivas’ children are desperate and pleading; and though often they seem caught in the midst of a punishment that’s only going to get worse (or else in the devices of a mother suffering from Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome), what nastiness they’re up to is not their own. Shown from shoulders up, their absence of visible limbs doesn’t weaken the overwhelming sense that hands are tightly bound behind backs. Rather than stepping into the frame, they’ve been placed there -- manipulated, dressed up and manhandled into the spotlight by demented stage mothers. Drained of vitality, their eyes are soulless or remorseful, dead coals or unstamped coins, and their postures are not their own. But they’d never disobey and release them. Activity and intent are reserved for animals, whether a bird that cocks a knowing eye, a dog snarling within his Elizabethean ruff, or a cat smoldering beneath a pom-pom-topped bonnet. (If you’ve ever dressed your own housepets in baby clothing, you’ll note Olivas captures the menacing glower of hatred a feline rendered impotent by Sunday best possesses; if not, well, give it a shot sometime.) “Cute” is in the eye of the beholder, as is “mad sick,” and the twain bash headfirst with the ferocity of mate-starved rams. Olivas’ progeny are each and both, captivating without cloying and not so gruesome as to make you back away, treated with dignity and respect by the artist even if not by the invisible puppet-masters that have set their poses. She’s been kind enough to leave a good deal up to the viewer, while still providing plenty of fodder for the imagination. A look at her Web site reveals that what we see here is just a portion of the entire mob of Misery Children; hopefully we’ll get to see more. Pittsburg Tribune The 'Mob' mentality By The Tribune-Review Thursday, February 10, 2005 Are children really as innocent and harmless as they might first appear? In the world of Kathie Olivas, the answer clearly is "No!" Working in oils on wood or canvas, Tampa-based Olivas presents a surreal world of disarmingly "aware" little people and she has brought that world to Pittsburgh with her solo-show "Cadaverous Mob" on view at Blue Ruin Gallery. Clearly children, but evoking a sense of adult knowledge and vices, her paintings of quirky little kids are designed to put you on edge and reflect an environment of isolation, fear and uncertainty in what she calls a "satirical look at how fear affects our sense of reality." Weekly Planet- Best of the Bay 2002 BEST PRINCESS OF POP Kathie Olivas Mention the name Kathie Olivas and three things come to mind. a) She holds the Planet title for Best Most Prolific Curator; b) She's got her artistic antenna tuned in to every artist under 30 (give or take a couple a decades); c) Now she's far more than the Bay area's art scene diva. Olivas is our choice as first Princess of Pop. Local spin has it that Olivas brings a unique, independent vision to Tampa Bay's fertile pop scene, where, truth be told, local young 'uns with a penchant for pop make art that looks too much like everybody else's stuff. But our Kathie is anything but a cookie-cutter type. How about her little parody figures wearing cutesy Olivas couture? Who would even dare to appropriate Ms. Olivas' bloomer girls? Check out her unbeatable strategy: She dons real or fictional personas and then creates fresh visual commentaries on issues such as women, identity, eroticism and female inferiority. She departed her Hyde Park Fine Arts curating nest, but look for her to continue organizing shows there and at Covivant. What else is in her future? Watch her art travel the national pop circuit. |
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Kathie Olivas is a multi-media artist who resides in Tampa, FL. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the nation. My current body of work, entitled the "Misery Children" series focuses on the constant social desire to assign "cuteness." This often serves as a means to make something innocent and more appealing, therefore, non-threatening. Perhaps this allows us to comfort ourselves. My questions are based on the discomfort of "what if"-- what if these sweet creatures had other ideas? What if they knew something we were afraid to open our eyes to? Would they protect themselves; would they be able to adapt to a war torn environment and develop their own defense mechanisms? The characters are meant to evoke a nostalgic reaction that reflects isolation, fear, and an uncertainty; yet, at the same time they serve as empowered alter egos. This series is presented as a satirical look at how fear affects our sense of reality. The characters perform as narrators in lonely worlds that each explores individually, creating his or her own perspective, and thus, own reality. As our hosts, the ensemble provides a sense of comfort, the reminiscent style is soothing, yet the mood is dark. As children, they evoke a sense of temporality; childhood serves as a starting ground, a place where things begin. Inspired by early American portraiture that often depicted children as small adults in an idealized new land, the characters parallel this vision within their own sense of post-apocalyptic conformity, uniquely documenting their own stories in a mysterious brave new world. |
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For more information on events or the artist, please visit CircusPosterus.com
