Juxtapoz Magazine – Grace Weaver’s “TRASH-SCAPES” Channel Beckett
Though subtle, movement is key in the works of Grace Weaver. Even her gestures to apply the paint to the canvas, she is about a perfect energy transfer. “I love working with the biggest canvasses that I can,” she told me in her cover story back in 2018. “So much of what is important to me is gesture—dramatic brushstrokes and big shapes. I find that’s only really possible when the canvas is the size of my body or bigger.” That the subject matter has revolved around running, outdoors and a sense of moving through a daily life, Weaver elegantly weaves a world of constant motion.
For her new solo show, TRASH-SCAPES, mostly a series of a couple in a parking lot with some of sort of “extra baggage,” there is still this element of workout-wear, of exercise, of exhaustion through vital movement. There’s urgency even though the characters appear relaxed, if not calm. It’s interesting that Weaver cites Sameul Beckett’s 1931 text, Proust, in the press release:
The respite is brief. ‘Of all human plants,’ writes Proust, ‘Habit requires the least fostering, and is the first to appear on the seeming desolation of the most barren rock.’ Brief, and dangerously painful. The fundamental duty of Habit, about which it describes the futile and stupefying arabesques of its supererogations, consists in a perpetual adjustment and readjustment of our organic sensibility of the conditions of its worlds.
Routine, organic, habit. In these simply profound works, the human experience is heightened, enlightened, investigated. —Evan Pricco