Frances Waite's "My Girl" 

Elijah Wheat Showroom is ecstatic to present works on paper by Frances Waite. She is a newly emerged artist with her first solo show, “My Girl”. The body of work is prolific with many playful, sexy illustrations of queer figures in bleak landscapes. Her cunning artistry portrays an intimate scrutiny while she celebrates sentimentality.

The affection in touch, being touched, and touching stretches across the surface based work provoking a viewer to feel big love. Often, the tiny, childlike characters sexually experiment between two worlds: A ghostlike past and a present orgasmic setting. Using some text, and with clear representation of sexual interactions with both highly rendered and gestural elements, she provides blaring commentary on the casual interactions of a stagnant solitary search for sexual comfort. In the midst of climax, often tears are indistinguishable from pussy squirts and cum shots.

With in a current sociological dating conundrum, a ‘love’ seeking generation emerges focused on judgmental superficial left/right swiping of one’s social media connections. Human images are presented as possible ‘dating’ options. With a flurry of false promises and controlled profile information, one objectification reigns: partner’s expectations.  

Frances has gained many followers. Her impressive popularity was earned after conducting an open-call experiment to deliver nude pictures (she’d take them any way digitally) and then would draw them. The project brought hundreds of anonymous photos via email, Instagram, WhatsApp, and even text. Proactively, Frances rendered over 50 of these 500+ submissions, focusing on images with limbs, not just the ‘dick-pics’ she received.

The artist communicates depicting representational contemporary queerness, and presents symbols connecting meaningful female relationships between her contemporary peers and ‘ghostmen’. The combination of figurative elements with text provides an explicit and subtle dialogue about the ease of finding willing partners—and the aftermath. Her imagery provides the viewer with most empowered yet vulnerable of sexual experiences.  Presenting stories of nudes moving through a barren landscape with smooth rapid transitions, or renditions of human figures sensually bouncing between bodies with non-connected ‘bangs’. Her sexual narratives describe voluminous interactions. This exhibit parades the nude with a captivating body of work.  Viewers will lean into stories of contemporary hook-up culture, female sexual desire, anonymous sex and embracing a culture of non-binary gender interplay or non-hetero-normative sexuality. A re-occurring theme of female sexual empowerment inside a tender and perceived vulnerability is keenly expressed. Relating to the amorphous and transmutable dating scene she takes "hook-up" culture, shakes it up, exposes it, and turns it upside down.