Kate Donoghue is a figural and narrative-based painter from Michigan. Using both personal and found documentary and advertisement imagery as reference material, she develops layered vignettes which contemplate gender identity, objectification, and performativity within the landscape of American consumerism. Donoghue’s reference images, ranging from Calvin Klein and Boys' Life advertisements to photographs of her lived environment as she passes through it, provide a visual vocabulary for addressing the foreboding expectations of gender roles, beauty standards, and social behavior. The resulting compositions draw attention to the aftermath of performative identity within American consumerist culture, the remains of which live on amongst us, marked by time yet inescapable. The work holds both a yearning for earnest nostalgia and quiet, unrelenting unease, retrospectively reflecting on the ways in which commercial institutions shape identity and aspiration, while questioning the boundaries between truth and artifice.

Kate Donoghue is a figural and narrative-based painter from Michigan. Using both personal and found documentary and advertisement imagery as reference material, she develops layered vignettes which contemplate gender identity, objectification, and performativity within the landscape of American consumerism. Donoghue’s reference images, ranging from Calvin Klein and Boys' Life advertisements to photographs of her lived environment as she passes through it, provide a visual vocabulary for addressing the foreboding expectations of gender roles, beauty standards, and social behavior. The resulting compositions draw attention to the aftermath of performative identity within American consumerist culture, the remains of which live on amongst us, marked by time yet inescapable. The work holds both a yearning for earnest nostalgia and quiet, unrelenting unease, retrospectively reflecting on the ways in which commercial institutions shape identity and aspiration, while questioning the boundaries between truth and artifice.