The Queer is in the Details: Douglas Watt’s Material Theatricality

For years, the subject of Douglas Watt’s sculptural practice has been spaces of community gathering in his neighbourhood, Vancouver’s historically queer Davie Village. The wall-mounted model floor plans he creates are crafty monuments to the community spaces, services, and businesses that have made the three blocks of Davie Street a queer refuge for decades. Little Sister’s (2023) reconstructs the original location of Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium, a bookstore and sex shop that challenged Canada’s obscenity laws in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Bath House (2019) and Clinic (2019) provide a figurative and literal floor plan for the sexual expression and health of the community, while Numbers (2022) and Pumpjack (2019) provide a sober perspective of their nightclub namesakes. The significance of these spaces is obvious given their centrality to queer culture in the city, but I am drawn to the way Watt develops the queer latency of presumed non-queer spaces—a laundromat and a pool—in his exhibitions “Infamous Stain” at Pumice Raft (Toronto) and “Deep End Epiphany” at Tara Downs (New York).

Watt’s works invite your eye to linger on the details, to search their cracks and crevices. The materials used in his models suggest no attempt to render these spaces accurately. In Laundry Valet (2024), a model of Watt’s local laundromat of the same name, scale and material likeness are of little concern: gridded drafting paper is used to denote a tiled floor; a white push pin becomes a toilet’s oversized tank lever; plastic white and yellow straws take the place of aluminum ventilation ducts. Silver sequins are used to render the texture of washing machine drums, lightbulbs, and, in Downstairs (Bridged) (2021), the metal floor drain of the Vancouver Aquatic Centre’s locker room. By inconsistently using the same object across multiple models, Watt offers a queer material logic; we cannot assume a proper application or calcified understanding of these materials (What is this sequin? Who is she?) and, by extension, the spaces they are building (What is this laundromat? Who is in this pool?).

The queerness in these models extends beyond the catachrestic materials. Some details don’t represent anything, appearing only as themselves, seemingly planted to shock us upon their discovery. “Surfer Dick (Wayne Yung, 1997, 3:20min)”—referring to, well, Wayne Yung’s 1997 video work Surfer Dick—is printed on a strip of white paper and adhered to the locker room message board of Downstairs (Bridged). Around the corner, a quarter is lodged between the walls, serving no purpose whatsoever. And then there is the glue and staples! Globs of hot glue unevenly line the open mouths of washing machines and hold the joints of laundry baskets together, while staples pin a wire mesh to the base of a model. The models draw attention to their crafty fabrication, proud of their constructedness.

Watt’s approach to model making extends to the sculptures that accompany his models. In “Deep End Epiphany,” Watt presented replications of two spargers (bubble makers) he saw in the deep end of the Aquatic Centre’s pool. “Infamous Stain” included five front-loading washing machine drums installed in a row. Unsurprisingly, sequins feature in both these sculptures. The size and shape of these sculptures are not faithful to the objects on which they are based, nor do they share a scale with the other sculptures they are exhibited beside. Moving from sculpture to sculpture, sculpture to model, the variance of scale throughout the installations requires the viewer to constantly renegotiate their perspective.

There is something undeniably theatrical about Watt’s work. I don’t mean that in relation to Michael Fried’s concept of theatricality as argued in his 1968 essay “Art and Objecthood,” though it certainly meets the criteria, a term he used to describe the reciprocal relationship between the artwork and viewer. I mean the the-ah-TUH, darling! Half a lifetime ago, when I was a Theatre Production student, my favourite classes were Set Design and Model Making, and my favourite crew to work on was the prop crew. The stage models we made weren’t necessarily to scale; they provided a concept more than anything. The first and most important lesson a prop-maker learns is the 40-foot rule: you are finished constructing your prop if it looks good from 40 feet away. Does that ball of Styrofoam look like a rock? Does that papier-mache look like wet lettuce? If so, you’re done! From a distance, Joint Pool (2021) looks like an accurate architectural model; the drum series looks like parts from a small washing machine. But we don’t view art from far away. We get up close. This occurs with Watt’s work if encountered in person or–as most viewers will encounter the work, as you are now–through close-up photographs. Watt knows this. He wants us to notice the imperfect construction and the deliberate use of incorrect materials. In Watt’s work, it is the depth of the surface that seduces us. In this sense, his brand of theatricality is very campy.

To critically describe something as campy, one (that is, me) would feel compelled to bring up Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” This is not because it once triggered a paradigm shift for me, or because I see Watt’s work as an embodiment of her 58 notes. I feel compelled to bring it up because of the space it takes up in the mainstream imagination of queer visual culture. Her opening note states that Camp can be understood “not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization,” followed by a claim that this stylization comes at the cost of content, rendering Camp “disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical.”¹ Such a footloose and fancy-free definition is seductive for straight and queer audiences alike who want to assimilate the flamboyant representation of queers into the mainstream and leave their radical, transformational politics behind. Sontag’s essay was even the inspiration for the 2019 Met Gala, an annual display of wealth and power masquerading as a fundraiser with a $35,000 ticket price.²

Queer theorist David Halperin’s understanding of Camp doesn’t prioritize artifice at the expense of content; rather, it sees artifice as a way of dealing with content. Camp allows one to “replay…trauma on a ludicrously amplified scale, so as to neutralize its pain without denying it.”³ This is exemplified in the performance of the Fire Island Italian widows during the annual Invasion of the Pines march. Gay men would dress in black veils, participating in the public wailing that their female Italian ancestors were allowed and expected to perform. This performance was not a parody of female performance but an opportunity to publicly grieve the partners, lovers, and friends they lost to HIV/AIDS. The Fire Island Italian widows show that the content of Camp can be pain, loss, love, desire, and a challenge to the politics that aim to silence those affects.

True to Halperin’s idea of Camp, Watt basks in an over-the-top aesthetic while maintaining a playful ambivalence towards his subject matter. His dedication to alternative material sources and disregard for consistent scale between models and props demonstrates his irreverence for the material and spatial reality of these spaces. The truth of these spaces is not in the stools of Pumpjack or the books of Little Sister’s; it’s in the way we build worlds while we populate them. What makes these queer-designated spaces queer are the sweaty dance nights, the book recommendations, the temporary lovers we hope to see again next weekend. Watt’s models and props suggest that queerness is not confined to a location. Instead, it is everywhere waiting to be discovered and activated in the places we expect it to be as much as the places we choose it to be. The pain, loss, love, and desire that flow through nightclubs and bath houses can be just as potent in a laundromat or pool.

The absence of people from Watt’s models points to specific yet ambiguous moments of time. Have the pool and locker rooms been freshly sanitized, now longing for bodies to make use of them? Is the laundromat at day’s end, after hundreds of cycles? Or are we looking at speculative moments, where Watt anticipates the shuttering of his community spaces? Opening, resting, closing, all at once. Like the hysterical cries of the Fire Island Italian widows, Watt’s campy use of materials acknowledges the perpetual loss—past, present, and future—that accompanies queer spaces, and the potential for queerness to rebuild in response.

Queerness has, yet again, become a boogeyman; drag queens reading to children, trans people in bathrooms, and pride flags at schools all are seen as imminent threats to social and personal well-being and have reinvigorated the moral right. The Camp aesthetic of Watt’s practice does nothing to pacify these fears. Queerness is everywhere, and it always will be. Just look for the sequins.

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Christopher Lacroix is an artist, writer, and PhD student in Vancouver, located on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) nations.

Douglas Watt (b. 1990, St. Catharines) is an artist living and working in Vancouver. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Unit 17 in Vancouver, Tara Downs in New York, and Pumice Raft in Toronto. His work has been reviewed twice in Artforum’s print edition, and was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2023. He holds a BA in Art History from Carleton University in Ottawa, was a visiting student in Criticism & Curatorial Practice at OCAD University in Toronto, and recently received his MFA from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

1. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation: and Other Essays (1966; reis New York: Picador USA, 2001), 276.
2. Vanessa Friedman, “The Met Gala 2019: Everything You Want to Know,” The New York Times, May 4, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/fashion/what-is-the-met-gala-and-who-gets-to-go.html.
3. David M. Halperin, How to be Gay (Cambridge, MA: Delknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 289.

This article is published in issue 42.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue