Thomas Erben is very much looking forward to presenting Distension, Olivia Reavey’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Her work was first featured in a two-person show at the gallery in the fall of 2025, followed by a solo presentation at this year’s Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) fair.
Distension refers to Reavey’s way of making, an internal pressure that swells, billows, and finally bursts, taking shape in her photographic practice. In this exhibition, a small cast of an improperly boiled egg, ruptured and spilling from its shell, exemplifies the dedication to “impropriety” that Reavey’s photographs explore. The symbol of the distended egg–a most basic domestic skill gone awry–relates to visions of femininity whose boundaries Reavey continuously undermines. Placed on a column centered in the space, it establishes a gravitational field around which her silver gelatin prints orbit.
In this universe, pressure builds through the use of found-objects, both failed and functioning, photographed by Reavey as extensions of the body. Her interest in collage, scale and the analog process are all in pursuit of dismounting expectations that photography has historically created for the figure.

The male body remains a central subject of investigation for Reavey, a counterpart to her self portraits and collaborator whose anatomy she distorts and reimagines in continuously negotiated moments of uncertainty. With unusual croppings and deliberate reconfigurations, she multiplies the body’s corporality as well as psychological potential. This same curiosity extends into the darkroom, where experimental exposures, prolonged processing, painting, and scratching, carry her inventiveness into the physical photographic object.

Olivia Reavey’s work is indicative of a generation’s unabashed assessment of its own situation, cracking hollow parameters of decorum, while still skirting the dangers of nihilism.

Olivia Reavey (b. 1998) received her MFA in Photography from Yale University in 2026 and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2020. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in summer 2026.

Reavey was recently featured on the cover of Bias Cut Magazine’s “The Body Issue,” and has forthcoming presentations at Paris Photo and Fernberger Gallery in Los Angeles.
Her work is included in The Rose, curated by Justine Kurland, which originated at The Lumber Room, Portland, OR, and was most recently on view at the Center for Photography Woodstock, Kingston, NY. Olivia has shown at The Independent Art Fair, Yancey Richardson and Helena Anrather. Work of hers has been published in The New York Times, Matte Magazine and Vogue.