Olivia Maday
Interference, 2026
Photographic Collage and Acrylic
Artist statement
“Interference” collages intimate moments from recorded performance, fragmenting my own body as an act of reclamation and resistance to male-authored representations of the female form. Evoking the surface of a video screen, the dark, reflective acrylic complicates the act of looking: as the viewer approaches, their own reflection interrupts and obscures the image beneath. The nude body is never fully accessible, shifting between visibility and concealment. In this exchange, the viewer becomes implicated in the act of looking, drawing attention to voyeurism, spectatorship, and the ways the female body is consumed through digital media.
Artist 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 work 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 nationally and internationally, including at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art Museum in South Korea, the University of Fine Arts Hamburg in Germany, and The Little Gallery of San Bernardino in California. Her solo exhibitions include Without the Divine at Living Arts of Tulsa in Oklahoma and The Darkroom at 82Parris in Portland, Maine. Maday is the recipient of numerous awards including Artist Project Grants from both the Maine Arts Commission and the Cambridge Art Association, and the Hamburg Exchange Fellowship from Tufts University. 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.
