The art of Olivia Rachel Austin can suggest the unnerving quality of a southern gothic horror story. Take a work like “I’m Fine,” in which the phrase “Send Help” is stitched, in elegant cursive, on a bed sheet in an embroidery hoop—an ominous message for a medium with a frilly and decorous history. Likewise, “Yes, Dear” partly comprises a serving tray in which the words “Make Me a Sandwich” are knifed into the wood in harsh, jagged letters.
The contrast between the pieces’ titles and the text they display is very much intentional. It’s “the juxtaposition of what you want to say versus what you do say,” says Austin, from her studio on the outskirts of the FAU campus. “I’m Fine” and “Yes, Dear” are the outward mirages of Stepford-style stability and servility, whereas “Send Help” and “Make Me a Sandwich” are the pleas and desires buried under the veneers.
Austin’s lineage and upbringing are vital to her practice, down to the material nitty-gritty, with its focus on textiles to which her ancestors would have had access. She grew up in the Bible Belt of Macon, Georgia, and she retains the region’s accent as well as its sense of gentility, addressing me, for instance, as “sir.”
In a way, she retains its domestic hierarchies, too, if only as a point of critique for her work, as a third-year graduate student in Studio Art at FAU’s Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. “In the South, where I grew up, those social structures are still in place today,” she says. “It’s kind of … you’re forced into that mold, or you leave. Everyone that is featured in my work are people I know or people I grew up with, and didn’t get out.”
As an emerging artist, Austin, 29, is still something of a secret in the wider art world of Palm Beach County; she doesn’t have a website at the time of this writing, and her social-media presence is minimal. But group exhibitions in 2024 at FAU’s Schmidt Gallery and especially the Cultural Council for Palm Beach County have increased her exposure. Back in January, she was chosen, alongside only nine other women artists, for the Council’s memorable “She. Her. Hers.” exhibition at its Lake Worth Beach gallery.
“The materials talk about an idealized past, with a tint of nostalgia, but when you came close and examined the works, you could see something intense was going on,” says Véronique Chagnon-Burke, who curated “She. Her. Hers.” “Between a deadpan humor and criticality, her work embraces the domestic to better subvert the idea of the home as a safe place. I really like that tension in her work.”
Austin’s eclectic background includes earning her bachelor’s degree in Studio Art from the University of Georgia; working at an art gallery in Scottsdale, Ariz.; and spending three years as a bench jeweler here in Boca, repairing and stone setting and soldering for companies like Jared, Kay and Zales. In addition to her graduate studies, she teaches Figure Drawing at FAU as part of her tuition-free scholarship in FAU’s Graduate Teaching Assistantship program.
Her work continues to be informed by found materials with an appealing vintage. Of the flaky, peeling vent cover that frames “Weep Not, It’s Laced,” her charcoal drawing of a rippling sky, she says, “I found this on the street next door. I go in a lot of trash bins. … I found the object, sat with it, and then created the image and decided to build it out. Every time I move it, a little piece falls off.”
Women’s roles are not always the subject of Austin’s work. Her two-part altarpiece “The Creature From Jekyll Island” explores income inequality. The work clothes of “labormen,” as she calls them, have also been central to recent mixed-media pieces on capitalism’s class divisions.
But she’s cognizant of the moment we’re living in, with its restrictions on women’s reproductive autonomy. It’s why her “Domestic Daydreams” series, like “I’m Fine” and “Yes, Dear,” has proven so resonant. “I like to talk about the macro by talking about the micro,” she says. “[It] feels like we’re being pushed back to this corner, after such growth. These people I grew up with, our mothers, had more rights than we do today.”
This article is from the September/October 2024 issue of Boca magazine. For more like this, click here to subscribe to the magazine.
