How AnthroCon Wrecked My Closet

(This was originally written for and posted by The Bunker Review on October 3, 2022. This piece was edited by Anna Mirzayan. Link to the original article in my CV.)



Most straight folks have a difficult time understanding the scope of “the closet” in queer vernacular. Even the most well-meaning allies tend to conceptualize it as this singular thing you can triumph over; you struggle with it, you fight valiantly against it, then you’re out and now you’re free. Congratulations, you killed the beast!

In actuality, it’s much less linear and much more pernicious. In my experience the closet functions not as a binary — you’re in or you’re out — but as a spectrum; an ever-present gauging of how visible your queerness can safely be. You’re always sitting somewhere on that spectrum, every interaction becoming a process of coming out or not coming out. The closet can manifest as severely and as all-encompassing as a lifelong denial of your sexuality or gender identity, or as minute as a split second of self doubt:

          Did I say that with too much of  a lilt in my voice? Should I tone that down?
          Is it cool to say that I have a boyfriend, or should I start with “I’m dating someone” first?
          Is anyone gonna take me seriously if I wear this outfit? Do I look silly?

It’s a defense mechanism, and there can be necessary safety in that. But it can quickly turn to morbid paranoia and self loathing. There’s a fear and emotional labor that comes with this inner dialogue coloring your everyday life, and boy is it exhausting. For me, “coming out” in the macro sense has been a process of shedding that fear, discarding the knee-jerk compulsion to hide and obfuscate. The inner dialogue never really goes away, but you can become unshackled by it.

Mark Zubrovich, Turncoat​ (2019). Installation shot at Bunker Projects.



“So, are you a furry?”
 
That question used to make my palms sweat. It came up more than once at my Pittsburgh residency with Bunker Projects in the spring of 2019.  My work there was expanding upon a years-long painting practice centered around anthropomorphic dogs that play baseball. I’d arrived at this work through my inability to integrate into the heteronormative culture of sports fandom, despite being a lifelong Mets fanatic. This series was a way to break down that barrier by queering something so prohibitively macho but so enticingly homosocial. So masculine but so tender. I had a desire to carve out a place in that world for my own strangeness, to make it gay and cuddly and doggie and free to sniff and lick without apprehension…  But IN NO WAY was that a FURRY thing! When that question came up, I could feel the closet sitting in my guts like a rock:
 
      Do I want my practice to be associated with that subculture? Is my art only about fetish?
         What will these new friends think if I welcome the association?  What will my FAMILY think?
         Will the art world take me seriously? Do I even take myself seriously? Do I look silly?
 
These anxieties race through my head in an instant, and suddenly I’m bloviating like a politician: “I’m furry adjacent! No real link to the fandom, but they’re very inspirational. A wonderful aesthetic. I can see why you’d make the connection. I’m not one though!!!”

Well, people can change a lot in three years.
 
Independence Day Weekend  2019 I was too afraid to officially register at the David Lawrence Convention Center. My residency was successful and finished. It was my last two days in Pittsburgh. And even though the world had lined up perfectly for me to be there, I could not bring myself to go in. Instead I stood outside, heart in throat and rock in stomach, and watched as thousands of animal costumes marched through downtown in the AnthroCon Fursuit Parade, as I snapped photos from a distance as they waved to onlookers and high-fived excited children.
 
In 2022, my partner was taking the photos; I was too busy marching in my fursuit. My fursuiter badge, a special marker given to con-goers in full costume, is numbered #1050 out of around 2500. What animal do I prefer to be? I’ll keep that private for now. Ok, one hint: I’m not a dog. At least, not until I make my dog suit. But I am a species that dogs hunt!
 
In case it wasn’t obvious, I’ve been a furry the whole time. I've had an affinity for it since adolescence, but only recently have I had the courage to fully step through that door. Many of the new friends I made at AnthroCon 2022 were the same, first-time attendees watching from a distance until the need to be authentically weird overrode any fear. And believe me, the weirdness envelops you like a bearhug when you finally enter that space (pun absolutely intended). This year’s convention, spanning three days and 9700 attendees, had all the exuberant eccentricity you can imagine and more. A marching band made entirely of fursuiters. A roving gang of roadkill opossums starting dance parties in the halls. A vendor selling fudge shaped like dog treats. A late night rave with a life-size blowup deer being thrown about the crowd. Hours long panels for enthusiasts of sexy werewolves or sentient pool toys.
 
 It’s natural that outsiders see the furry community as, at best, idiosyncratic and a bit silly. At worst, it’s weaponized by conservatives to stoke modern day gay panic, presented as a sure sign of degenerate societal collapse. Either way, there’s an image of furry as an unabashedly, sometimes uncouthly kinky subculture. I will make no efforts to cleanse that assumption, because it is absolutely true. AnthroCon has muzzles, harnesses, leashes, and straps. Horses with big breasts, tigers with bulging underwear. And more naughty illustrations and dirty comic books than you could fit in your suitcase. This is a feature, not a deviation. Sensuality is a prominent and integral part of the larger whole. Like me, so many of the new friends I made at AnthroCon grapple with mental illness, social anxiety, and gender identity issues. Its an OVERWHELMINGLY queer subculture, with trans nonbinary and rainbow flags dominating the con space as much as the brightly colored animal suits. Everyone around you is some flavor of misfit. And we’re all happy to see each other’s fuzzy faces.  At AnthroCon, the closet dissipates. There is no fear in the dialogue. I’ve got my mask. My “fursona”. I look silly. So do you.
 
Clearly there is plenty of raucous fun at AC! There are also friends crying in each other’s fuzzy arms because they’d never met in person before now, or haven't seen each other since the pandemic. There were couples proposing on the waterfront. There was a charity drive that raised $41,000 for an animal shelter. On Saturday there was a block party after the Fursuit Parade, where Penn Avenue was shut down and hundreds of yinzers came to welcome the furries back after a rough two years. A local news headline that day read “Nature Is Healing: The Furries Are Back”, because Pittsburgh in particular has embraced and made welcome this fiercely loving and radically strange community. I’ll be back in town for Independence Day 2023.

Mark Zubrovich, Bruce Bites (2022)

The spring of 2019 felt, in many ways, like jumping into water without knowing its temperature. My childhood home had just been sold. I had quit my job to throw myself headfirst into artmaking. I was still grieving the death of my closest friend, who had been driven to alcoholism by, amongst other things, the pernicious self-hatred of the closet. (He used to tease me about being “a secret furry”. I would vehemently deny it.) My coming out process was already well in motion when I arrived in Pittsburgh that year, but it was unstoppable by the time I left. I mention at the beginning of this piece that when the closet holds you back it can feel like safety, a defense against potential violence. But as it protects you, it suffocates you. I’m reminded of late music producer and trans icon SOPHIE’s track where she asks the listener repeatedly “Is It Cold In The Water?” I did not find out until I jumped.
 
Since my time at Bunker I’ve continued to paint my dogs, and the work has grown more and more puppy, more kink-forward, more free to lick and sniff at will. There’s no single turning point between then and now where I was no longer afraid of being openly furry, or having my work be associated with it. It might have been in 2019 outside the convention center with my camera. It might have been a few months after, when I met my partner. If anything, writing this piece has made me realize that I’ve still not fully shed that anxiety. But I can say for sure that a major tipping point was around the fall of 2020,  when I left the baseball allegory behind in my artwork. At the height of the pandemic, when everything felt like it was on the edge of collapse, the pressure to queer something as enormous as sports culture felt not only futile, but unnecessary. There was no longer a need to prove anything, no need for a metaphor: life is short, just be the creature you are. I’m still madly in love with baseball (I am writing this sentence the day after losing my voice at a Mets game) but if it ever resurfaces in my work it will be part of the larger fabric, another element in my universe. As it turns out, my dogs speak on their own as queer vessels. And so do I.
 
Speak!
 
Woof!

A.A. Bronson "Felix Partz, June 5 1994"

As I’m writing this, the world is on fire.

My last post on this website on March 13 was about the SPRING/BREAK Art Show, a massive New York art show with a hundred independent curators packed together into tight corridors and literal cubicles. I wrote about the art I saw, the theme of “In Excess”, and even made some subtle gestures at satisfaction that the show was less blatantly political and more of artists doing their own weird thing. It’s dumbfounding to look back, just under 3 months ago, to see how utterly myopic that now all feels.

As I’m writing this, the world is on fire. Seven days after posting that blog, Governer Cuomo ordered a mandatory quarantine for all New Yorkers in the wake of a massive outbreak of the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19. It is June 5. 108,000 people have died in the US. Millions have lost their jobs and will lose their homes. The threat of this pandemic loomed over the heads of everyone participating in SPRING/BREAK. But we as citizens had been lead to believe that this virus was no big deal, and if it was, it wouldn’t really effect us much. The disease had only been known to be widespread in China, and China is very far away. Little did we know that this pandemic was already sweeping through the city. Well before we were told to wear face masks, keep 6 feet away from each other, and to not shake hands. That art show, with a hundred curators and thousands of visitors packed into cubicles and hallways, was most likely a hotbed of disease. I say that with confidence because I developed a mild case of the coronavirus just as we were put into quarantine.

As I’m writing this, the world is on fire. Today is June 5, and the entire world is now in its second week of enraged protests against police and systemic racism. On February 23, a 25 year old black man named Ahmaud Arbery was murdered while jogging in Georgia. His murderers were “attempting a citizens arrest”, and in doing so they hit him with their truck, called him a racial slur, and shot him. On March 13, the day I last posted, a 26 year old black EMT named Breonna Taylor was murdered by the Louisville Metro Police. They were raiding for narcotics, and had the wrong house. On May 25th, a 46 year old black man named George Floyd was murdered by the Minneapolis Police Department after being arrested without incident. The arresting officer wrestled him to the ground and knelt on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, while 3 other officers stood and watched.

As I’m writing this, over 10,000 people have been arrested in the Black Lives Matter protests that broke out in reaction to these murders. Some of those 10,000 are being held under a bogus charge of breaking quarantine rules. There have been hundreds if not thousands of filmed instances of police escalating violence against peaceful protesters, hitting them with their police cars, cracking their skulls with ‘less than lethal’ bullets, ignoring bleeding elderly men in the streets, pulling down coronavirus face masks to mace demonstrators, and performing false gestures of solidarity to bring citizens closer only to shoot them with tear gas. Police have been documented raiding a gay bar for harboring protesters and shouting homophobic slurs at crowds.


Today is June 5, and twenty six years ago today Felix Partz died in his bedroom.

felix-partz-june-5-1994-aa-bronson.jpg


The photo was taken by A.A. Bronson, Partz’s dear friend and collaborator in the art collective General Idea. Felix, Bronson, and Jorge Zontal formed their collective in 1967 and became extremely influential figures in the emerging world of conceptual and media-based art. In the mid 80s, their work became focused on the growing AIDS epidemic ravaging gay communities. They left their hometown of Toronto and fled to New York under the threat of ramped-up homophobic policing in their city, Zontal being arrested in a routine bath house raid. It was in New York that they made their most famous work, namely giant inflatable pills of the suppressant drug AZT, and the IMAGEVIRUS series which appropriated from Robert Indiana’s LOVE brand and turned the letters into A I D S.

Most people do not know this, but AIDS was not the first acronym used to describe the disease. Originally it was GRID, which stands for Gay Related Immune Deficiency. Many were fed the lie that only gay people could get HIV, and gay people are very far away. This pathologizing of queer sexuality and weaponizing of targeted misinformation, fueled by systemic racism and overpolicing of gay areas populated mostly by people of color, is one of the reasons this epidemic went ignored in the US for almost a decade.

In 1990, Partz and Zontal were both diagnosed with AIDS. They attempted to continue making work for the next 4 years, but they both eventually went back to Toronto for home hospice. Zontal died first, on February 3. Felix died four months later, the day this picture was taken. Felix had been dead for a few hours when Bronson took the picture, though he looks like he’s been gone for much longer. His shirt and bedsheets are fabulously patterned, and he’s surrounded by vibrant colors, a pack of cigarettes, and a tape recorder he carried almost everywhere. His eyes are fixed at the camera lens, but there is nothing behind them anymore.

I first saw this photograph in early 2011, when I had just turned 18. It was at the Whitney Museum in a show called Singular Visions, where a floor of the museum was divvied up into individual rooms that each housed one piece of art. This photograph is the size of a billboard, blown up from its original size so that when you get close to it you can see each dot left from the printing process. The room that housed this image was the smallest of them all. At that time I was just barely cracking the door of the closet open. A year previous, a friend had committed suicide. When I entered that little room, I was confronted with death, queerness, otherness, disease, despair, vibrancy, color, and a violent realization that the person I was going to become will always be tied to what is happening in that photograph.

Twenty six years ago today, Felix Partz died in his bedroom. There are still a great many fights queer people need to fight, and we are by no means equal citizens, but gay rights has become a worldwide movement since 1994. It continues to gain massive support and effect systemic change. AIDS is no longer the killer epidemic it was in the 80s and 90s, and the stigma of gay men being diseased has very very slowly begun to fade into history.

As I’m writing this, the world is on fire. It’s June 5. Breonna Taylor’s birthday is today. She would have been 27. We are in the midst of two pandemics in this country. COVID-19, and racism, It seems as though things have not changed much for black Americans since 1994. They especially have not changed for black gay people, and black trans people. I worry that by writing this and describing the deaths of Breonna, Ahmaud, and George, I have contributed to the long history of white artists using black suffering as an abstract for their own purposes. These protests have made me realize that the emotions I felt at 18 when confronted with Felix’s death are emotions that black Americans have been drowning in for centuries. That realization that the person you’re going to become will always be tied to the trauma of those who came before you.

SPRING/BREAK Art Fair 2020

I’ll start off this blog post with a necessary disclaimer. I’m more than a little bit biased about this years SPRING/BREAK Art Fair. My work is featured in FURY INC, a booth in this year’s show, thanks to curators Sarah Fuhrman and Chris D’acunto who have been long time friends and colleagues of mine. Naturally, one should take my oncoming praise of the show with some hefty grains of salt. It’s still a pretty neat fair, though.

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My first time venturing out to view SPRING/BREAK Art Fair was half a decade ago. The show, made up of mostly independent curators, struck a unique chord. The fairs now signature hallways of converted office space filled with manic post-internet video art, messy found-object installations, and playful interactive pieces presented a pent up burst of creative energy. It was a welcome push against the scrubbed-clean operations of more prestigious fairs on Armory week. Five years later the show has expanded in scope and notoriety while maintaining much of the scrappy weirdness that has consistently made it as interesting as it is.



SPRING/BREAK takes place on Madison Avenue this year in the former office headquarters of Ralph Lauren. It’s two floors and over 100 booths, making for a labyrinthian experience trying to see it all. The work ranges from expansive sound pieces in wide open hallways to large-scale paintings crammed into literal cubicles no bigger than a prison cell. The theme this year is IN EXCESS, prompting the artists to draw on themes of degeneracy, consumerism, and way way way overdoing it.

The theme of excess permeates the whole show, contributed by individual artists and teams of curators. Much of the curation celebrates our fits of creative hedonism in both form and content. Some overwhelm the senses and give a whole kitchen sink’s worth of eye candy, while others give themselves whatever limited breathing room they can to highlight specific works. Colin Radcliffe’s humorously tragic ceramics of past lovers splayed out on a desk in booth #1168, curated by Dan Halm. Scooter La Forge’s dinner table of fractured fairy tales in booth #1002. Natascha Wright’s slippery abstractions of the female figure hung on weathered fashion ads in booth #1115, curated by Ben Pritchard with SFA Projects.


One booth I found early on that eagerly plays with our consumer sensibilities is REPOSSESSED, booth #1013 curated by Brooklyn based artist Hannah Antalek. The group show brings together a deafeningly colorful array of paintings and sculptures by Anthony Iacomella, Alex Xerri, Nicole Dyer, and Gary Marecic. Hannah’s paintings depict hypersaturated images of childhood play broken up with graphic renderings of Lisa Frank stickers. A chunky, Minecraft-like sword by Marecic sits in the corner. Xerri’s racecar paintings appear lifted from memories of a metalhead child’s playtime, while Iacomella’s funky little ceramics conjure images of ashing a cigarette into Bart Simpson’s face. Dyer’s big painting fills a canvas with an utterly packed shelf of personal items. Medication, art books, slices of cake, and open jars of peanut butter hang out and free-associate in it’s jammed composition, and the painting itself sits on two hand-constructed and painted La Croix boxes.

Just down the hall in booth #1009 there is a group show similarly enamored with branding and high fructose corn syrup. JUST FOR THE TASTE OF IT, curated by Jac Lahav and Eli Bronner, manages to string together a show of 24 artists hyperfocusing around their collective fascination with, or in Lahav’s words, a “manifestation of my addiction to” Diet Coke. In one corner painter Paul Gagner renders a cheese-headed deadhead with a literal Diet Coke IV drip, fatalistically paired next to a shadowboxed shrine to death and soda pop by Kristen Racaniello called “Miraculous Fount”. The adjacent wall holds a pen drawing of a figure drinking soda with their feet. Lahav’s massive paper-mache Coke can with a stoned glazed smile sits in the back of the room, several smaller versions of itself with the heads of Garfield nestled in its blown out inner cavity. The cramped space is surreal, obsessive, and exudes a sugary sweetness tied inexorably to contemporary living.


Much of the curation at SPRING/BREAK this year touches on this same manic energy. A pleasure-seeking operation gone slightly awry, as pleasure-seeking operations often do. UNNATURAL INTIMACY, booth #1060 curated by Daniel Morowitz confronts us with the consequences of our pleasures. Heaven, hell, and purgatory in one space. Morowitz sinks his own work firmly in Hell, the paintings hanging on a wall marked with a massive pink pentagram. Paired with Morowitz is Paul Anagostopolous, whose computer-perfect gradients and direct reference to Greek male beauty sit comfortably in Hell next to Morowitz’s layered washes and obfuscated homages to snakes and gay pornography. In purgatory there is the pairing of Stephen Saliba and Nicole Basilone, whose work both radiate a brilliant earthy green. Saliba’s dramatically lit figurative paintings depict both chaos and repose while poking at a world ruled by cartoon logic. Basilone’s landscapes-verging-on-abstraction suggest a similar warping of one’s own visions. Heaven takes up the final wall and spills to the outside. A lamp by Anastasya Tarasenko and sardonic paintings by her and Sarah Furhman sit among worn out lawn chairs and patches of fake grass, hammering home a contentious relationship with the disturbed domesticity depicted in their work.

Two especially overwhelming booths are solo shows by Kate Klingbeil and Super Future Kid, organized respectively by Field Projects and Mindy Solomon Gallery. The two shows are exemplary of what a higher budget and gallery support can bring to the inherently wacky nature SPRING/BREAK demands of its curators. Curated by the team of Jacob Rhodes, Rachel Frank, and Kristen Racaniello, Kate’s booth #1065, BURROWED, presents a massive cross-section of the earth. Half a dozen icing-thick canvases of humans in nature seamlessly bleed into a wall painting, which is dotted by hundreds of hand piped paint elements. Marching ladybugs, squirrels sleeping in their underground homes, and onions with human faces give depth to what feels like a larger than life middle school science diagram. Super Future Kid’s booth #1003 constructs a literal candy land complete with powdered floors and a pink river running through the middle. You enter the space through a gingerbread house made of actual, intensely aromatic, gingerbread. Paintings of cats with bowties and long-tongued cartoon girls licking glowing rainbow lollipops populate the space. You’re allowed to take a seat on bean bags made to look like big red mushrooms, but the candy-frosted intensity of it all is almost unnerving in its joyousness. It’s title, TWO FOR ME NONE FOR YOU: A NARRATIVE ON EXCESS AND WISHFUL THINKING, suggests this is on purpose. One might say it’s all a bit excessive.

Overall, this year’s SPRING/BREAK Art show succeeds in swinging wildly and unabashedly at its themes of excess and opulence. It’s a notable contrast from shows in previous years which weighed more heavily on themes of social upheaval and contentious political divisions. There are a few booths where current events come to the forefront, most notably Valery Estabrook’s Impeachmint series of commemorative coins chronicling President Trump’s many shortcomings, and Haley Hughes’s paintings depicting police violence and contemporary protest. But for the most part the pathos and real creative energy of the work presented at SPRING/BREAK 2020 lies just underneath a sugary sour surface.

Nat Meade "Never Learn To Not Cease To Exist" at Honey Ramka

Honey Ramka

56 Bogart Street

Brooklyn NY

December 7 - January 13


A blocky rectangular face with a thin pointed nose is absorbed in a transcendent moment. He's bathed in a warm pink light. His melancholic expression fills the whole image. Tears flow down his face, rendered solid and static as they cast harsh shadows across his cheek. As if it were not saline but pale blue iron falling from his closed eyes. This exercise of capturing the moment one is lost in their own senses is at the core of Nat Meade’s paintings.


Nat Meade renders a language of sensory stimulation through a language of color and shape. His work reads as autobiographical in the way that describing the viscosity of a milkshake you had with dinner last week is autobiographical. The subject of your memory is long gone, pushed out the other end, consumed. No longer tangible, and never will be in that state again. The only way we can resurrect it from the ashes of memory is to relay it back through our bodily experience.


The artist relays this through a language of vibrating color relationships and rounded human forms. His figures act as guides for the viewer to project their own bodily experience on. In one painting, a network of round-edged rectangles comes together to form a head blissfully suckling on an equally rectangular ice pop. A cool Granny Smith green is brushed over the deep orange underpainting, making the ice pop glow with all the freshness of a tart lime sherbet or, icy mint. In another piece called Gust, a male figure with a flowing beard and golden blonde hair holds a flower to his nose. Stubby splotches of pink paint become flower petals swirling around him in a moment of psychedelic envelopment.


At the time of me writing this, this show is in its last days. Soon these paintings will be taken down, sent to their respective owners, and will go on to live their own lives. In a way my attempts to frame a snapshot of Honey Ramka’s walls are a mirror to Nat’s attempts to capture the smell of a flower whose petals have long since flown away in the wind.


Justin Liam O'Brien and Celeste Rapone "Rose-Tinted" At Monya Rowe Gallery

Monya Rowe Gallery

November 29 -Jan 5

224 30th St #1002, Manhattan

Justin Liam O'Brien and Celeste Rapone are two painters dealing with the human form in a tight spot. Their work unifies through the process of fitting those bodies into a space, however comfortably or uncomfortably that may turn out. Whether that space be a domestic one, the space between or within another body, or even the space of the picture plane itself.


Justin uses a sort of geometric logic to fit the boys in his paintings together. In “I Feel As If I were Protecting You” squares and cylinders meld together to form the tube-like arms of two figures in a lopsided embrace. They're framed on either side by a symmetrical framework of a closed window and two halves of a tall, thin,  gesturally painted houseplant. The left and right edges could theoretically wrap around, as if this scene could tessellate on forever. In “Boys Bathing” a pair of male figures appear almost globular, their arms and legs blending and melting into the dark glowing blue that they're wading in. They're spreading their legs for each other, but the murky water obscures enough for the unseen to remain mostly unseen. There's a tenderness in its eroticism. But an insecurity as well. How they're brushed on in soft gradients that feel round and sometimes wet. How two bodies can slide so perfectly together, but in the next moment could slip apart.

Celeste Rapone brings a lexicon of domestic objects along with her figures. There is loving attention paid to the inanimate in Celestes pieces. A zebra print rug or bottle of Keystone Light become extensions of the bodies they're corresponding to. In a painting whose name I'm regrettably forgetting, a pair of electric blue Crocs glow upon the feet of a female figure. She dons a fuzzily rendered pink tracksuit, the “medium” tag remaining plastered to the suits behind, painted to look very much like a real sticker. She huddles over an oversized checker board, painted flat on the surface in bold squares of thick black and red. Her body fills the whole space of the rectangle, enveloping these objects into her form. Something similar happens in “Girls Girl”. In this piece the lounging female figure is left mostly to our imagination, her arms tangled together and only a single eye visible on her face. But every pleat and fold of her blue jeans and Gucci belt are given to us. The figure occupying the space becomes almost a vessel for the things on and around them. She could disappear into those blue jeans and we would be none the wiser.

The gallery itself doesn't cover much surface area. And there are several pieces in this show. But they're not overcrowding one another. They've managed to squeeze paintings into tight spaces, hugging the corners of narrow walls and nestled close to fire safety equipment. Justin and Celeste make a small space feel both cramped and cozy.