It used to be easy to distinguish the In-Real-Life from the virtual. Now, it seems the two worlds are colliding, spilling into one another—for better and for worse. New frontiers of identification and social communication birthed online now find their way into everyday discourse. The toxic pits of anonymous internet forums spawn new hate crimes and mass shootings regularly.
My work comes from one such instance of this cultural spillage. As a teenager, I stumbled upon the Furry community; an internet-based social identity culture wherein participants create and interact through anthropomorphized animal characters. While my involvement in this community began as a personal venture for self-exploration and socializing, I now consider my identification within Furry culture as an essential means for critiquing contemporary notions regarding subjectivity, sex- uality, and relationships to so-called nature, technology, and reality.
My fursona Atmus, a white-tailed deer, acts dually as my stand-in and muse in these artworks. Real Problems came out of a fascination with portraying him in scenes of peril or faux violence. Atmus is both a-part-of and apart-from me; enacting these morbid fantasies feels like catharsis for my anxieties about the precarity that my generation lives with daily. As threats of societal obliteration compound—climate crisis, mass shootings, viral pandemics, or whatever the new emergency is today—artwork and fantasy seem necessary mechanisms for enduring the crushing weight of our constant catastrophes.
While these works function as an outlet for these stresses, they are also examinations. These works underline my confusion around what is considered “real”. Atmus is not a real deer, but neither could he be called a fake version of anything; I made him up to be whatever I want, and therefore he must be authentic. A new something. My fursuit2 is a body, but one which adheres to different rules than mine. How is a tear different from a wound? How might it be similar? What are the limitations of a body made in fantasy? What are its potentials?
Real Problems is not only a rumination on the real problems we face in our world today, but it is more specifically a rumination on the problems surrounding being-and-becoming real. As Atmus takes shape in this world through my efforts to express and explore him, I look to our society and wonder: who would ever want to be real?
