At the core of Doughtie’s work is a desire to form intimate relationships between objects and the body in proximity to the awkwardness of a vulnerable situation. Relating alchemy, queerness, the quotidian and the strange, he utilizes sculpture and installation in the service of generating new bodily experiences that transcend socially normative expectations and the inherent queerness of an object defying its assumed function.

For the installation Locker Room at BasketShop Gallery, a deconstructed shower room is presented cluttered with objects. Tile walls, copper pipes, cast plaster fruits and toys, towel racks with socks cast aside, and protruding plumbing implements are transformed from their original function to stand in for skin, organs, limbs, or strange exposed genitals, emphasizing vulnerability, desire, and the fluidity of identity.

Doughtie’s sculptures are metaphors for how he envisions his own body and the bodies of those who are, like himself, transgender. Often within the sculptures are tools that would be used specifically as a trans person to push the body to something that is beyond its current limits. The spaces that he explores are ones in which we most directly encounter the needs and boundaries of our own bodies and sometimes in close proximity to the bodies of others.

Elliot Doughtie is a Baltimore-based artist originally from Dallas, TX. Doughtie has exhibited at Fjord Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), School 33 Art Center (Baltimore, MD), The Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, TX), Arlington Arts Center (Arlington, VA), and Re:Art show (Brooklyn, NY). Artist residencies include ACRE (Steuben, WI). Doughtie received a BA from Tulane University and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. He is a 2018 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant recipient.