‘My Girl’ was Frances Waite’s first solo exhibition, hosted by the Elijah Wheat Showroom in Brooklyn, New York. The show included many new works, including interpretations and developments of her Selfies project; we include her both images shown at the exhibition and others contemporary with it.
Here is the text which accompanied the exhibition catalogue:
Her body of work is prolific with many playful, sexy illustrations of queer figures in bleak landscapes. Her cunning artistry portrays an intimate scrutiny while celebrating 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. 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, tears are often indistinguishable from pussy squirts and cum shots.
The artist presents symbols connecting meaningful female relationships between her contemporary peers and ‘ghost-men’. The elements provide an explicit and subtle dialogue about the ease of finding willing partners – and the aftermath. Her imagery provides the viewer with the most empowered yet vulnerable of sexual experiences. Presenting stories of naked figures moving through a barren landscape with smooth rapid transitions, her sexual narratives describe different qualities of interaction. Viewers will identify with stories of contemporary hook-up culture, female sexual desire, anonymous sex, and non-binary gender interplay and non-heteronormative sexuality. A recurring theme of female sexual empowerment alongside a tender and vulnerability is keenly expressed. Responding to the amorphous and transmutable dating scene, she takes hook-up culture, shakes it up, exposes it, and turns it upside down.