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 the highly sexualized in mundane somewhat bucolic settings, we might begin to have a more expansive relationship to this language. What exactly is meant by these phrases? Are they addressing acting bodies, or the larger social order and its architecture? Who or what is speaker?

During the act of stenciling, for which I obtain no permission and narrowly avoided a police car on two occasions, I inhabit a curious subjectivity. Like all subjectivities, it is unstable, fleeting, but it is very intense. 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).