Olivia Maday
What Consumes Us, 2025
Beading on vinyl
Artist Statement
What Consumes Us considers the relationship between bodily interiority and the surface logic of the moving image. Composed of beading applied to vinyl, the front of the piece evokes vascular structures—circulation, connective tissue, and internal systems that sustain the body yet typically remain unseen. The use of beading, a material historically associated with ornamentation and feminized labor, reframes the body’s internal architecture as something both intricate and beautiful.
The reverse side of the work is a reflective surface that functions as a stand-in for the screen in film, television, and digital media. As viewers move around the piece, they encounter their own reflections, becoming embedded within the work itself. This reflection implicates the viewer in the act of spectatorship, collapsing distinctions between body and image, subject and object. Instead of offering the body for visual consumption, the work reverses the dynamic, with the body’s interior systems overtaking and consuming the screen.
By placing an exposed, circulatory surface against a glossy, image-driven material, the work introduces friction between depth and surface, interior and exterior. The body is not presented as a stable image to be consumed, but as an active presence that presses outward, unsettling the authority of the screen and absorbing the viewer into its field.
Bio
Olivia Maday is a Portland, Maine based multidisciplinary artist working in video, sound, and installation. She holds an MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and a BFA in Film & Television from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her research investigates the representation of women in Western media and art history, reimagining gendered power structures and challenging legacies of objectification. Through on-screen performance and multi-channel installation, she asserts her own agency within the film and media landscape, employing elements of the grotesque to subvert traditions of voyeurism that have historically rendered women as passive objects of visual consumption.
Maday’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art Museum in Gimpo, South Korea, and the University of Fine Arts Hamburg in Germany. Most recently, she presented her 2025 solo exhibition Without the Divine at Living Arts of Tulsa in Oklahoma. Maday was the 2023 recipient of the Hamburg Exchange Fellowship through Tufts University and has received additional support from the Montague International Travel Grant and the Becker Emergency Artist Grant. In addition to her studio practice, Maday has contributed to the curatorial field as co-curator of It Followed Me Home at Gallery 263 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She previously served as the Post-Graduate Teaching Fellow in Curatorial Practice and Media Arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and currently teaches in the Digital Media Department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
www.oliviamaday.com
@olivia_maday
