VANESSA N

All You Do Is Eat Cum steals the language of video captions from porn-streaming website XHamster and stencils them onto plain walls across America. By placing pornographic text in somewhat bucolic settings, I aim for a confusion between the body’s response to the landscape and the body’s response to the text. One might trigger a feeling of relaxation and purity experiencing the beauty of open landscape, but is cut short by the juxtaposition of the vulgarity of the text.

New questions might arise: Who is speaker, the subject, the object?

During the act of stenciling, for which I obtain no permission and have narrowly avoided the police on two occasions, I inhabit a curious subjectivity. Like all subjectivities, it is unstable, fleeting. I become a criminal and a question to those who read the stencil once I leave. Especially when writing captions that address the male body, I am struck by the thought of who I am assumed to be.

I especially felt this way, when stenciling a highway median Indiana, where I was almost confronted by police, as I stenciled the words “I control your cock and balls from now on.” I was unable to complete the stencil, leaving “I control your cock.” The experience left me shaken and wondering what might be my excuse had I been caught? The stencil remained at least for some days if not weeks. I considered who the casual reader might assume wrote it. Having looked at much graffiti across the United States, I rarely come across text written from a femme or queer sexuality, and that names the male body as an object acted upon by a subject.

All photos shot on 135mm film. All stencils are actual stencils (black spray paint).