Anya Roberts-Toney makes color-driven oil paintings that explore femininity, pleasure and the precarity of how the female body gets viewed. Her practice is motivated by the false promise that the objectives of feminism have been accomplished and how Western art history (which promises pleasure for the viewer at the subject's expense) reinforces expectations of womxn’s frailty by utilizing the female body as an object for viewing. Roberts-Toney’s artworks inhibit the availability of the female figure—and the paintings themselves—by using varying levels of abstraction and obfuscation. Bodies overlap and morph with the scenery; arching shapes and portals bisect the landscape; perspective shifts from deep to shallow. By combining marks that shroud with moments of pleasure, her works activate—and complicate—the desire to look.