Allyson Mitchell facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Allyson Mitchell
Born	1967 Scarborough ON
Education	York University
Known for	sculptor, installation artist, and filmmaker

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 and the body largely through the use of reclaimed textile and abandoned craft. Throughout her career, Mitchell has critiqued socio-historical phobias of femininity and colonial histories, as well as ventured into topics of consumption under capitalism, queer feelings, queer love, fat being, fatphobia, 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 at York University.

Early life and education

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.

Works

In 1996, Mitchell cofounded the fat activist and performance art collective 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

Ladies Sasquatch

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. 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!”.

A Girl's Journey Into the Well of Forbidden Knowledge

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. One wall is lined with reproductions of drawings made to document and honour the books in the Archives’ holdings. The installation pays homage not only to the Lesbian Herstory Archives, but to all feminist presses, bookstores and libraries that advocate for the significance of women’s stories, histories and acts of resistance. The drawings also serve to memorialize the disappearing history of material texts that have long connected queer communities, as women’s publishers and bookstores (“essential meeting places for lesbians, and for all women”) become lost in the digital age.

Kill Joy's Kastle

Kill Joy’s Kastle: A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House was a large scale, multiroom, multimedia and immersive piece created by All#yson Mitchell and Dierdre Logue in collaboration with over a hundred artists and performers. Kill Joy’s Kastle was first installed in the fall of 2013 in Toronto. It was also displayed in London, Los Angeles and Philadelphia in the following years.

Themes

Deep Lez

Mitchell’s work is rooted in the collective feelings surrounding feminism and lesbian feminism. In 2009, Mitchell published a manifesto for this methodology, titled “Deep Lez I Statement”. Through its merging of elements of lesbian feminism and contemporary intersectional queer politics, Deep Lez functions as a queer critique of lesbian feminism’s gender essentialism, transphobia, and whiteness. In doing so, it attempts to create a “both/and” sensibility that embraces multiple histories and perspectives. Deep Lez was conceptualized by Mitchell as an “experiment, a process, an aesthetic, and a blend of theory and practice which aims to acknowledge and address histories of conflict and erasure in feminist and queer movements”. It serves as a guiding philosophy and methodology for Mitchell as an artist, and a framework through which to understand the broader implications of her work. Described by Mitchell as a “macraméd conceptual tangle”, Deep Lez questions how art and politics integrate, and acknowledges contemporary queer and feminist movements’ need to “develop inclusive liberatory feminisms while examining strategic benefits of maintaining some components of a radical lesbian theory and practice”. Deep Lez is embodied through an ongoing series of artworks by Mitchell that reappropriate public space for radical, political lesbian identity.

Craft as Queer and Feminist Resistance

Mitchell is one of a few contemporary artists using craft as a largely unregulated site of protest and feminist resistance. Crafting, which has long played a vital role in the social and communal sphere, has been taken up by various artists as a tool of queer and feminist resistance with which to “unpick and unravel the very binaries between high/low, art/craft, male/female”. Through her frequent use of textured and tactile fibres through which to celebrate lesbian feminism and kinship, Mitchell’s work creates a site of transformation, embodiment and power. This use of craft as a mode of subversion, resistance and worldbuilding can be contextualized within larger feminist legacies of craft. Many artists engaged in the second-wave feminist movement worked to exploit the longstanding relationship between craft and gender, using craft as a “weapon of resistance”. This was marked by the revolution of what became known as “fiber art”. Fiber artists recognized categories such as “soft art” or “soft sculpture” as modes through which to merge the divide between art and craft. Today, the practice of crafting has been taken up as an essential part of queer-feminist survival. This use of craft is evident in Mitchell’s work, in which she uses textiles as a means of worldmaking and the subversion of heteropatriarchal norms surrounding gender.

Collections

Agnes Etherington Art Gallery, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario
National Library and Archives, Ottawa, Ontario
Trent University, Peterborough Ontario
Carleton University, Ottawa Ontario
McMaster University, Hamilton Ontario