Kaitlyn Elizabeth Steward
Kait Steward is a 23 year old recent graduate of Murray State University, where she earned her Bachelors of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing. She is creating work, actively pursuing graduate school, and being generally nervous about life.
Kait grew up between corn fields and coal mines, in Uniontown, Kentucky. Having grown up in a rural, conservative, majority Christian town, Kait felt a strong sense of gender roles and experienced gender-specific safety concerns from a young age. However, she has not turned her back on her home, but rather uses their teachings and upbringings to influence her work as a young woman.
Her work focuses on her general sense of anxiety and vulnerability that comes along with being a young woman in today’s society. Using imagery like doors, locks, keys, and windows, Kait’s pieces aim to draw the viewer into considering ways they interact with their world, whether that be closing themselves in or shutting others out. Lately she has been focusing on using odd vantage points to depict a sense of surveillance and paranoia.
Kait’s main goal is to ask the viewer what their role and responsibility as a bystander is to our current social climate. Will they stand and look on, or will they step in? Who will be the watcher and who will be the watched?