You'll Never Be More Than Just a Woman

by Olivia Kays

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 disempowerment and consumption. Reflecting on the nature of oppression generationally and personally. Kays’ work exists within the contradiction of desire for belonging and resistance to conditions that define it. Her work examines how ideas of womanhood have been shaped, sold, and sustained through external systems of control and internalized expectations. 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.