Caroline Weinstock: The Dead Pet

Caroline Weinstock’s first solo exhibition explores the feeling of being replaced. Across a series of thirty two small-scale paintings made over a period of three years, Weinstock’s conceptual and diaristic work investigates intimacy, absence, and death with wry wit. The Dead Pet references the dead dog, the dead relationship, but also the act of painting as petting something dead. Using oil on linen, marble, and panel, the artist draws a comparison between two social instances of replacement: romantic partners and pets. She depicts her mother’s replacement of her childhood dog and her exes’ replacements of her. By transforming transient imagery from social media into more permanent paintings, she refuses to allow the replacements to erase the past. Sketching the new girlfriend’s casual, affectionate gestures in oil, Weinstock develops her own intimate form of address. The various modes of painting–loose, gestural abstraction vs precise rendering; highly chromatic vs muted palettes–carry with them different lines of interpretation. From the information-rich source imagery, Weinstock retrieves only selective detail. She captures lovers’ closeness and at the same time, with painterly brevity strips them of identifying context; they are made generic. These abbreviations only thinly disguise the obsession undeniable in the work. A heart-shaped cake might once have been ours, but now it is theirs.

Rather than simply making nostalgic representations, Weinstock sublimates the couples’ relationships by painting into them. A mise-en-abyme effect takes place as the artworks-as-replacements appear in the circuitry of social media. She subtly critiques the strangeness of our digital age, highlighting unlimited reasons for apology.