BmoreArt

The faucet is coated in white resin, unable to be turned. There is no shower head in sight. With the more obvious functions of a locker room thwarted by the artist, the viewer is left to consider its less obvious functions: permeability, disorientation, erosion, and accumulation. A scattering of objects that sometimes explicitly, some- times implicitly reference sex toys also invoke discovery, either with the self or with others.

In part because locker rooms are most often single-sex spaces, this vulnerability combined with the potential for intimacy is inherently queer. But more significantly, the themes of identity construction, performance, and façade are staples of queer art. If an identity can be constructed, it can also be deconstructed, clearing the way for any number of transformations.

Many of Doughtie’s sculptures look like rooms disassembled. Or perhaps more accurately, rooms in the midst of construction. When one takes apart a room, we think sledgehammer. A mess of two-by-fours and insulation all covered in plaster dust. Conversely, Doughtie’s sculptures are manicured and precise, like a cutaway drawing. Doughtie shows the viewer enough to know that there is an outer context but that we are peeking behind the surface at what is typically internal.

“Vulnerability goes through all of my work,” says Doughtie. “How we relate to objects is part of it. That pile of socks on the bathroom floor. You have to deal with it eventually.”

Doughtie is directly referencing Laundry Day Dubuffet (2021–present), an ongoing series of sculptures by the artist that uses stiff plaster molds of athletic tube socks to form multi-level structures. With these pieces, he fashions laundry into structures that resemble a house of cards, soiled yet delicate. (Untreated plaster, according to Doughtie, is a “vulnerable” material, sensitive and easily broken.) This sculpture series, like many of Doughtie’s other works, signals a threshold at the crux of the personal and the performative—an article of clothing to be hidden in a shoe and yet boasting colorful stripes, clothing some find repulsive and others embrace as kinky fetish.

The content of one’s laundry basket is decidedly private, and society encourages us to keep it that way. Don’t air your dirty laundry in public, we’re told. At the same time, the laundry basket doesn’t remain strictly individual. Here we can also find evidence of our most vulnerable moments in relation to others: stretched-out underwear, stained bedsheets, or a sock hastily grabbed to mop up a moment of passion.

The conflict of private and public selves is evident in Doughtie’s earlier work as well, whether through high- lighting the gaps of bathroom stall doors (“Stall Game,” 2019) or, more metaphorically, using teeth to create the sense of danger one might feel in such spaces (“With Teeth, The Fox, He Comes,” 2019). “In Anticipation” (2019), the viewer is presented with the barest sketch of a space: a few black- tiled panels, rendered in acrylic paint, are hung on one gallery wall while another freestanding, white-tiled square “looks on” from across the room. Copper pipes snake into the air as if allured, mesmerized. The title of the work suggests a wait that is part thrill, part dread—which makes the alignment/misalignment of potentially penetrative objects and more orifice-like structures of Anticipation all the more agonizing. Of course, where agony can be found, there is also the potential for ecstasy.

Perhaps the ability of agony to transform into ecstasy is at the heart of Doughtie’s sculptures. The work defies binaries, as binaries are rigid, solid modes of operation and these sculptures refuse simple matches of form and function. On one level, the transformation from one emotional state to another is chemical, which is to say it is also physical. And much like our emotions, our major moments of change are often completely out of our control. Maybe this is why so many people find solace in returning to the gym over and over again; they can prove to themselves that, at least today, they can successfully complete a repetition.

Doughtie’s most recent piece, “Tomato” (2023), shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, uses many of the same visual tropes as “Locker Room” but raises some additional questions. The title suggests an organic subject, but the color palette is industrial—black, white, copper, and aluminum. A cutaway drawing of a tomato would show skin, placental tissue, and seeds; Doughtie’s “Tomato” shows navel oranges cast in white plaster, a copper pipe partially wrapped in resin that drapes over a black platform like a string, and a scattering of crowbars sprouting calyces (the protective enclosures of flowers before they bloom). What do we choose to label as organic or inorganic? Natural or unnatural? Is “Tomato” a case of mistaken identity, a fruit taking on the title of a vegetable? Or is all this taxonomy a red herring?

While there is a lot to figure out with Doughtie’s sculptures, we aren’t handed any easy answers. “A lot of sculpture is a way of problem-solving,” he says. Though Doughtie is referencing the physical act of assembling sculpture, the sentiment seems just as applicable to how one might view such artwork.

A final answer might be beside the point. What we process—and how we process it—is the fuel that keeps us going. Eating has no answer because eating itself is not a question. (It does still baffle and delight me that scientists can’t explain exactly what happens to a banana when we eat it. That we go to doctors to learn something we don’t know, and so often they know just as little as we do—or less.) Bodily knowledge can be felt in a way that bypasses the rational mind.

Our bodies, naturally, are ever-changing. Skin flakes off and regenerates, fat cells shrink and expand, spines compress and elongate, muscles knot and relax. What does it mean—and is it possible to become—comfortable in one’s skin?

“I don’t know if it is possible,” says Doughtie. “You get comfortable in one sense and then there goes something else. In the bathroom, you’re dealing with your body. You become comfortable the longer you confront it. Staring at yourself in the mirror, getting the right haircut, stepping out from the private to the public. Do you become comfortable? Maybe. Fragile? Yes.”