Allyson Mitchell

Allyson Mitchell is a Toronto-based maximalist artist, working predominantly in sculpture, installation and film.

Her practice melds feminism and pop culture to trouble contemporary representations of women, sexuality and the body largely through the use of reclaimed textile and abandoned craft.

Throughout her career, Mitchell has critiqued socio-historical phobias of femininity, feminine bodies and colonial histories, as well as ventured into topics of consumption under capitalism, queer feelings, queer love, fat being, fatphobia, genital fears and cultural practices.

Her work is rooted in a Deep Lez methodology, which merges lesbian feminism with contemporary queer politics.

Mitchell is based in Toronto, where she is an assistant professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at York University.

She received her three degrees from York University: her B.A. in Women Studies and English (1995); her M.A. in Women Studies (1998); and her Ph.D. in Women Studies (2006).

Mitchell's Ph.D. thesis constructed a feminist theory of body geography, looking at the ways in which our body image shifts in different contexts.

In 1996, Mitchell cofounded the fat activist and performance art collective, Pretty Porky and Pissed Off with Ruby Rowan and Mariko Tamaki.

In 2010, Mitchell cofounded Feminist Art Gallery with Deirdre Logue.

For her work Kill Joy's Kastle, Mitchell created a lesbian feminist haunted house.

She is represented by Katherine Mulherin Contemporary Art.

Her works have exhibited in galleries and festivals across Canada, the US and Europe, including Tate Modern, the Textile Museum of Canada, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, the Andy Warhol Museum, Walker Art Center, The British Film Institute, Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives.

Work as co-editor

Mitchell’s Ladies Sasquatch is an ongoing project that has taken up various forms.

It foregrounds six mythical “she-beast” sculptures, made of synthetic fur and colourful textiles and reaching heights of up to eleven feet.

The fuzzy, humanoid creatures are depicted gathered around a campfire, positioned in unique poses, with hairy breasts, nipples and vulvas on prominent display.

Each has been given a name by Mitchell, including Silverback, Tawny, Bunny, Oxana, Maxy and Midge.

They are accompanied by a family of “familiars”: tiny, strange-looking mammals taxidermized in cotton-candy-pink fur.

According to Mitchell, Lady Sasquatch is “your dream girl, only bigger and hairier- and she might eat you if you don’t look out!”.

Indigenous folklore about the “Sasquatch”, or Big Foot (as it is often referred to in settler colonial states) has long been appropriated by the white Canadian mainstream.

This appropriation can be understood as an expression of the racist fears around the “otherness” of Indigenous culture, and of nature.

Ladies Sasquatch, then, has been interpreted by some as a commentary on the Indigenous myth of Sasquatch and the racist symbolic implications it has for settler colonial states, through which Mitchell re-imagines the myth through a decolonized and radical feminist lens.

The giantesses both represent nature and do not exist apart from it.

Ultimately, viewers may see the “Sasquatch” in Mitchell’s work as a figure embodying sexist tropes of queer bodies in regard to femininity’s ties to nature, through which Mitchell deliberately blurs the Western binaries imposed between nature and culture, man and woman, and celebrates queer feminist identity.

“Fiercely animalistic”, Mitchell’s sculptures are constructed with taxidermic parts like shining glass eyes, wet-looking black nostrils and pointed claws, their mouths open to reveal bright pink tongues and long, gleaming white teeth.

Still, there is a playfulness and humour to the work, with certain textiles being used by Mitchell to evoke senses of nostalgia and familiarity rooted in memories of home and childhood.

This comforting quality invites the viewer into a physical relationship with the sculptures, whom they are encouraged to join by the campfire, to interact with, and to touch.

“People walk in here, and they become part of this circle… implicated in the lesbian feminist separatist politics, regardless of gender” (Allyson Mitchell, interview).

Mitchell’s use of textiles in making the pieces also works to disrupt Western, masculinized perceptions of art, specifically those surrounding sculpture as a medium: “the association of textiles with feminist practice works to trouble the viewer’s expectations of massive sculpture”.

In her fabrication of Ladies Sasquatch, Mitchell simultaneously mocks and subverts the masculinity often associated with sculpture and other such fundaments of Western art.

Rather than using the cold stone or metal typical to conventional sculptures that tend to be showcased in traditional art spaces, she purposefully selects textured, tactile, tufted and woven fibers with which to build the figures of Ladies Sasquatch.

In doing so, Mitchell creates a sensorium that allows for the celebration of the radical politics of lesbian sexuality and community building.

When encountering Ladies Sasquatch, the viewer is invited into a bizarre, beautiful and undeniably erotic world, rich with texture, humour and joyful displays of femininity, queerness and desire.

The size, strength and fierceness of the exclusively female collective in Ladies Sasquatch suggest a social order that exists beyond the patriarchal status quo, and a rejection of male-dominated urban civilization.

In many ways, the work appears to represent a queer utopia, in which the inhabitants live free of the heteropatriarchal male gaze and instead enjoy a space both created and populated by “unbridled feminine energy”.

There is also a mythical element to this gathering; in her review of the installation, curator Carla Garnet notes that the figures seem to be enacting a “modern yet primordial” re-interpretation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, pointing to the pieces’ shared interrogating of the social organization of mythological feminine power.

As well, Garnet suggests that the fabrication process of the piece provides a model for the building of queer feminist communities, a theme common among Mitchell’s other works.

Through an exploration of themes such as lesbian feminism, sexuality, queer kinship and community building, Ladies Sasquatch provides a site within which patriarchal understandings are disrupted, and public space is reclaimed for radical lesbian experience.

A Girl’s Journey into the Well of Forbidden Knowledge was a 2010 installation for the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, in which Mitchell recreated a version of the Lesbian Herstory Archives reading room in Brooklyn.

The work, inspired by Mitchell’s time spent at the Archives while living in New York, brought lesbian feminist history and culture to a larger public by transforming the gallery space into a lesbian feminist library.