Artist: Grace Weaver
Exhibition title: Skinny Latte
Venue: Soy Capitán, Berlin, Germany
Date: September 18 – October 31, 2015
Photography: Roman März, images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Soy Capitán, Berlin
That moment when your earnest efforts at “making eyes” are thwarted by the pesky intervention of a tube of Maybelline Great Lash® mascara. At least your lashes are lush!
That feeling when – minding your own business – you try to swipe left and wind up instead in a head-over-heels trip when slippery flip-flop trip meets
. Or when best-laid-plans in the form of flirty skirt or white-on-white are foiled by treacherous weather: you become a foolish upskirt photo-op and gosh, all you can think to do is 
.
Our heroine is a kind of amiable fool, a goody-two-shoes with her 
in the right place but her head in the
. It’s a tough and nasty world out there for this young-girl, looking for love in all the wrong places. But in these paintings, tragicomedy falls more into the gentle register of #fail than Shakespearean melodrama. The drama may be high, but the stakes are emphatically low.
The lynchpin of these paintings is the a pratfall, but our good-girl is just one in a parade of pleasure-seekers, lazy loungers looking for love or at the very least: #yum. It is a choreographed dance of missed connections and near misses; the closest we come to cheek-to-cheek lovers’ union is the shadow of one face thrown across another, or the glow of an iPhone screen pulled in close.
The land-of-milk-and-honey becomes transmuted into a landscape of LITE. These are paintings made for maximum mouthfeel, replete with delectable color and dainty detail. They are pictures of being alone together, in defense of the sweet failure of the empty calorie. Licking, smoking, sucking, swiping in search of satisfaction, we cross our fingers that we might not come up empty this time. On our search for delicious, it’s a pause to luxuriate – eyes closed – in the lush emptiness of fat-free froth, in the Skinny Latte.
Grace Weaver, Lust for lite, 2014
Grace Weaver, Profile, 2015
Grace Weaver, Sunday brunch w/bb, 2015
Grace Weaver, Getaway, 2015
Grace Weaver, Winning some / losing some, 2015