Elijah Wheat Showroom is pumped up to present Frances Waite’s third solo exhibition “Here You Come Again”, showing August 27 through October 10, 2021 with an opening reception Saturday, 28 from 3PM-6PM.

Waite’s photorealistic graphic drawings are shot through with remnants of the past in style, theme and subject, bearing a stark and affecting witness to the agency of the subject. Using stock online photography and vintage snapshots purchased in bulk on eBay as her starting points for many of these pieces, Waite creates a portrait of the artist as seen while seeing, confrontational while gentle, brash while intimate; pushing and pulling between the public and the private, between memory and erasure. At the same time, an impersonal impulse seeks to bring the work far from its origin, rendering that origin source removed and disenfranchised, even while an immeasurable emotional meaning remains in play.

We consider in these drawings the careful eradication of a heavy smudge, or the forgiveness of an impression of difficult memory. Lines emerge as the works build something from something else, leaving a trace on heavy splotches or memorializing a found photograph through the deletion of graphite strokes. Letting things go, crossing them out, being finished, all gone, all done...Waite’s art delicately exposes the hand, thereby removing the work of the hands altogether.

This definitive style defies portrait filters or face-enhancing software. Raw and exposed, the narrative inhabits each title. Whether an image is fake or fantasy, the object is real. When focused on rendering real-life intimate moments of strangers, the subjects stray from coyness and engage the viewer, aware of the power held behind a lens. Incorporating playfulness, figures emerge in an ultimate confrontation. Permission is futile; control becomes allegory.

The drawings are initially exposed and introduced to her followers online, mostly escaping sensitive content parameters or censorship. However, subverting the patriarchal gaze, Waite attends the space with an interpretive hand, coercing a mixed reality that each time awaits acknowledgement. Pressed by an internal angst, she addresses the unrealistic representation and real-life tension engendered by social media, with its oxymoronic presentations of feminism. Whether a dick is being squashed by an androgynous foot, mischievous phallic critters linger in gestural lines, or a dildo acts as a gun in a self-referential portrait, Waites in these drawings fervently implies vulnerability and spins it into strength.

Frances Waite (b.1993, Rochester, NY. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA). Waite graduated from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York in 2015 with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Drawing. Solo Exhibitions: Hot Water, Cob, London (2021); Escape Fantasy (OVR), Cob, London (2020); Slap the Void, Elijah Wheat Showroom, Brooklyn, New York (2018); My Girl, Elijah Wheat Showroom, Brooklyn, New York (2016). Group Exhibitions include New Discretions, Funny Games, Western Exhibitions Drawing Biennial, Western Exhibitions, Chicago, Illinois (2021); Female Trouble, Western Exhibitions, Chicago, Illinois, (2020); Island, Ramp Gallery, London, United Kingdom, (2020); Graduation, Good Mother Gallery, Oakland, California, (2019); The Anti Art Fair with Elijah Wheat Showroom, London, United Kingdom, (2019); Here for the Right Reasons (Curated by Janie Korn & Artie Niederhoffer), Sleep Center, New York (2017); Nasty Women, Knockdown Center, Brooklyn, New York (2017); Tie His Hands Gently (Curated by Aurel Schmidt), Romeo, New York, New York (2017); No Empty Vessels, Gildar Gallery, Denver, Colorado (2016); Her Mojo, ASH Art & Space, Long Island City, New York (2016); Phantasmagoria, Kunsthalle Projects, Brooklyn, New York (2015).