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 reflecting on the nature of oppression, generationally and personally. She is experimenting with her work, painting more intuitively, letting go of control, and giving herself room and space to think in her new body of work.

Kays’ work exists within contradicting but embracing femininity. 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 past magazine imagery and media from the 1950s to the 1970s. 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. These specific time periods are integral because they align with the period that defined her grandmother’s prime. Her grandmother was her first significant 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.