MARCH is pleased to announce our first solo presentation of works by Olive Hayes, a collection of small-scale drawings made in colored pencil on paper. The series chronicles Hayes’ emotional state – her anxieties, desires, and curiosities – through surreal distortions of the external. Inner psychologies are drawn to the surface, each portrait rearranged into a reflection of the subject’s psyche. Undulating emotions are rendered in equally fluctuating forms, yielding faces that are frantic, tragic, and charged. Yet despite their apparent malaise, these portraits live in the realm of the humorous and the absurd, possessing a lightness that prevents any transmission of their wants or woes.
Hayes employs traditional methods to create each visage, juxtaposing precisely blended tones with the cartoonish and childlike. Symbols abound – teardrops swell and leap from dotted eyes, hearts and droplets are blown and spit from swollen lips, and pointed noses curl curiously upwards. Couples meet in imperfect alignment, sharing in one sensation, while solitary figures dart and dive towards unknown stimulants. The drawings are unplanned and spontaneous, forming a visual stream of consciousness and documenting various locations in Hayes’ emotional landscape: fear, lust, insecurity, passion, connection.
Olive Hayes was born in 1997 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and earned her BFA from Moore College of Art & Design in 2020. Today, her home and studio is in Philadelphia, where she works as an art teacher to children in kindergarten through second grade. Hayes has exhibited at Goldie Paley Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), The NOW at A WAY Gallery (British Columbia, Canada), Levy Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), Annenberg Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), and the Moore College of Art & Design (Philadelphia, PA). Hayes received the Deborah Deery ’01, ’12 Memorial Award for Excellence in Art Education in 2020, the Fanny Brennan Scholarship for Excellence in Painting in 2019, and the Virginia E. Lewis Scholarship Fund from The Pittsburgh Foundation in 2018, among others. Hayes was recently selected for the 2021 Rome Art Program (Rome, Italy).
For more information: info@marchgallery.org.