PETER WAITE:
SIMULTANEOUS CONTRAST - SCULPTURE / FETISH / OBJECT / THINGS

University of Connecticut Contemporary Art Gallery
Storrs, CT,
February 10 - April 10, 2009

The surprise in Peter Waite's work at the University of Connecticut's Contemporary Art Gallery is its intensely playful tone.

Simultaneous Contrast constitutes an almost shocking shift of approach for an artist best known for his monumental paintings of architectural subjects generally concerned with somber, even existential meditations on the human condition.

Here, Waite presents us with sculptures: Lilliputian arenas in which miniaturized people slog through charred, sludge-filled, apocalyptic settings. Tiny figures in mismatched scale traipse along, blissfully unaware of the big picture.

In Temple, a gaggle of tourists move through a scenic location (referring to the artist's visit to a Greek temple in Segesta, Sicily). The are "carefully herded together," as the wall text states, against the threat of relatively monstrous toy insects and reptiles.

The System: How it Works presents an "art factory." Construction "stuff" (foam board slathered, Pollock-like, with drizzles of paint) is dumped onto one end of a conveyor belt, from which it is divided by "Four Sensing Eyes" into "good" and "bad" categories and pours off the other end in two streams. What's the implicit vantage-point of our tiny factory workers? Their Matchbox cars (one drivers a sporty red Mustang) are parked in a diminutive parking lot by the front gate, where there's also the soot-marked remnants of their bonfire-and-a-few-beers after-work ritual.

Everything about these constructions has to do with child's play, from their intricacy to the endless run-on narrative that only a child's absorbed sense of play can sustain.

These are the products of unfiltered, rapt invention. The organizing pivot is the interplay between the adult voice of the wall texts, which accompany viewers through the intricate maze of details, coupled with the inescapable, entrancing familiarity of a child's viewpoint.

There is no way to read these objects without imaginatively getting down on the floor and earnestly reconstructing their making.

It is from that intimate viewpoint that you engage with these tiny players; stand back, and you've only got the adult's perspective - the tourist's eye.

- Review by Patricia Rosoff
Art New England Magazine, June / July 2009