Electric Chair I

We humans are a mess — hunter-gatherers bent out of shape by our grip on nature.

Peter Waite's “Social Studies” vividly documents our predicament.

Though we make no explicit appearance in Waite's paintings, we're never really absent; we hover offstage, an unseen miasma, opaquely responsible for the pathology onstage, like mafiosi in Leonardo Sciascia's crime novels about Sicilian society.

- John Alcorn
excerpted from catalog essay
for “Social Studies” exhibition
Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University
April 1998