[11] “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.
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.
[11] 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.
[11] 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”.
[11] 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.
[12] 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.
[16] 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.
[15] Kill Joy’s Kastle: A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House was a large scale, multiroom, multimedia and immersive piece[17] created by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue in collaboration with over a hundred artists and performers.
[2] Employing a performance similar to those seen in traditional Hell Houses, Kill Joy’s Kastle leads audience members through a dramatized retelling of lesbian feminist “herstory”, designed to “pervert, not convert” its viewers.
[2] Throughout the rest of the tour, audience members are led through the world of Kill Joy’s Kastle, in which they encounter the queered resurrection of “Dead” theories, ideas, movements and stereotypes such as “Riot Ghouls”, “Paranormal Consciousness Raisers”, “Zombie Folk Singers”, “Ball Busting Butches”, “Four Faced Internet Trolls” and “Polyamorous Vampiric Grannies”.
[2] An emotionally immersive and embodied space created with Mitchell’s signature maximalist style and rooted in a “Deep Lez” philosophy (see “Themes” section of this article), the installation uses humor and discomfort to engage audience members, disrupt mainstream discourse surrounding lesbianism and feminism and challenge narratives of liberal process.
[2] Kill Joy’s Kastle’s first iteration in Toronto yielded a large and contentious reaction from viewers, many of whom felt that the installation was white-centric and transphobic, highlighting tensions within lesbian and queer communities.
[17] Mitchell apologized directly to the individuals who had negative experiences with the installation in a public letter, in which she took personal responsibility and situated the project in the racist and transphobic histories of lesbian feminism.
[2] 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”.
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”.
[18] Through her frequent use of textured and tactile fibres through which to celebrate lesbian feminism, sexuality and kinship, Mitchell’s work creates a site of transformation, embodiment and power.