presence
2015
presence was created during the Roundtable Residency (Toronto, August 2015). During the residency, Legault continued his exploration of the relationship between queer embodiment and photography. More specifically, he examined his personal relationship to being trans/having a trans body, as well as being queer, and fat. The crux of the
exploration was the dual desire to fully inhabit his body, with all its societally determined “faults,” and, concurrently, to create alternative images and modes of depicting queer/trans/fat bodies as sexy, autonomous, and powerful on their own terms, while disrupting the narrative of cohesive identity traditionally tied to the conventional portrait.
Further, presence elicits a certain gay (male) culture, visually evoking the space of the bathhouse (with the dripping sweat, the tiled/patterned backdrop, the charged space between “cruising” bodies), and referencing the gay “bear” community/identity and its fetishization of hair, bellies, and muscle. While playing on these relatively conventional
aspects of embodied gay identity, the triptych also disrupts the traditional gay idolatry of the single-gendered or single-sexed (read: uncomplicatedly male/masculine) body, via cropping—to just above the genitalia—and via visible surgery scars, rupturing an easy reading both of the physical body represented and of the of concept of maleness itself.
2015
presence was created during the Roundtable Residency (Toronto, August 2015). During the residency, Legault continued his exploration of the relationship between queer embodiment and photography. More specifically, he examined his personal relationship to being trans/having a trans body, as well as being queer, and fat. The crux of the
exploration was the dual desire to fully inhabit his body, with all its societally determined “faults,” and, concurrently, to create alternative images and modes of depicting queer/trans/fat bodies as sexy, autonomous, and powerful on their own terms, while disrupting the narrative of cohesive identity traditionally tied to the conventional portrait.
Further, presence elicits a certain gay (male) culture, visually evoking the space of the bathhouse (with the dripping sweat, the tiled/patterned backdrop, the charged space between “cruising” bodies), and referencing the gay “bear” community/identity and its fetishization of hair, bellies, and muscle. While playing on these relatively conventional
aspects of embodied gay identity, the triptych also disrupts the traditional gay idolatry of the single-gendered or single-sexed (read: uncomplicatedly male/masculine) body, via cropping—to just above the genitalia—and via visible surgery scars, rupturing an easy reading both of the physical body represented and of the of concept of maleness itself.