“19,000 Scanned Anal Queefs and Counting”
installation by Christopher Lacroix

December 2, 2023 to January 13, 2024

Access Gallery
222 East Georgia Street
Vancouver, BC

open Tuesday to Saturday from Noon to 5pm

The Air That Remains in the Room
text by Yani Kong

Sheets and sheets and sheets of paper. Some appearing blank, some entirely dark. Plain white broken by pixelated markings, or long strips of lines in varying shadows that shift from grey to black in occasional slim faint shreds, or thick striped sandwiching leaner ones. They blanket the walls, stacked in multiples, loaded onto nails, free for the taking.

Individually, the papers appear like a mistake of technology, the trace of a xerox malfunction, but among its sibling sheets, “19,000 Scanned Anal Queefs and Counting” becomes an archive of gesture. A catalogue of a singular gesture to be sure, recorded by the artist made from his own body. As evidence of their causal action, the papers, save for sheer volume, don't easily convince us that something has happened. Indeed, what we see is a lot of absence. Because Lacroix has been blessedly plain in his titling, we know what to look for and can begin to examine the room for the plethora of released air sourced from a within that we don't speak about.

Once you move past the fact that queefs are funny, they can also be incredibly sexy, maintaining their own kind of mystery, both unpredictable and fleeting. Archived on paper, here they are also studious and careful, yet as pages they can be read as both full of evidence and full of nothing. In the wash of white paper, they accumulate a spectral quality: a ghost – or many of them.

We ought to acknowledge that we continue to persist in a culture that fosters phobic public interest and admonishment of queer identities. Recently, particularly in North America, the focus has been on trans exclusionary politics and the policing of bodies in drag. Bodies that exude physical evidence of queerness (and bodies that don't) are under attack, regulated for the ways that they represent themselves, a mode to penalise desire.

Yet, “queerness”, as theorist José Esteban Muñoz writes, “is rarely complemented by evidence.” [1] Muñoz is identifying the sort of detective work required by the average homophobe to sleuth out queerness by reading behaviour, struts, and style. Legible signs are collapsed with sex as if what is left behind when the act is over remains lodged in the exterior body. For the homophobe, this queerness, not the vibration left on the skin or the air that passes after pulling out.

Strategically, Lacroix makes literal the heteronormative demand for official evidence by documenting the ephemeral traces of the going-going-gone queef. By nature, this postcoital trace resists documentation, so the sheets of paper are better for tracking quantity rather than making tangible their quality. What occurs is the evocation of sex without bodies and pleasures. Lacroix asks, can we represent queerness without representing the body?

He has imagined for us the source of all this penetration and it's not another body. No, it's a modified leg press machine rigged to induce and record the queef that he has named “Campsite Rules Are In Effect”. The structure is somewhere between gym equipment and fetish furniture (with few differences between the two). The scanner that slides beneath it, that standard office contraption, makes the work light with humour while the machine's hard edges and torturous connotations are softened by the smoothness of the silicone dildos that complete it as a device for pleasure and pain. “Campsite Rules” reminds us, as Muñoz has written, that in the lived discourse of being queer, these sensations are never experienced along a strict binary [2]. Here they are knitted in the desire and intimacies of queer self-sex.

I embrace Lacroix's frank hardline association between queerness and sex, noting as he does that the fraught relations between queer folks and the world around them occur precisely because of who they do and do not fuck. “19,000 Scanned Anal Queefs and Counting” is a velvet hammer where the spectral queef is multiplied to the point of constituting a haunting, and a sex machine of medieval proportions skims the lines of desire, intimacy, performance and pain. These are methods and mediums that stretch wide the limits of representation to carve out an artistic and scholarly space of the exploration of queer sex separated from the tropes of identity.

[1][2] José Esteban Muñoz, “Gesture, Ephemera, and Queer Feeling: Approaching Kevin Aviance,” In Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition, second edition (New York, USA: NYU Press, 2019), 65, 74

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