Damn You, Allyson Mitchell |
Do you know Allyson Mitchell’ s artwork?. To be accurate and fair – I don’t know anything about art. I belong to the “I know what I like” camp and stick to things that either catch my eye and make me feel good, or things that are familiar.
That being said, I try to be open minded. Artists have always been the forward thinkers of society. They push the limits. And Allyson Mitchell certainly pushes mine. She is mixes feminism and pop culture and makes a statement, regardless of her medium. In her visual art collection Fat Craft her work certainly speaks to me. I look at these images and the words and the down-home-ness of the craft medium, and it makes me sad. I don’t know what she wanted to say, but I’ll tell you what I heard. Women are isolated by their fat. We are defined by our fat. Fat is judged as wrong and bad so therefore, the more fat we have, the worse we are.
I don’t look at those pieces and think “gee, that would bring out the accent colour of my rug” as I generally look at art. This is meaningful art. It’s the kind that makes me want to own it, but hide it away. Like she made it just for me and is speaking directly to me. It scares me a bit because it makes me confront myself and think about how I view women and their fat and what I really truly feel about it all. Damn you Allyson.
Allyson pushed the limits in her most-talked about collection Lady Sasquatch. In interviews, she has said that she wanted to challenge the normative ideas about beauty and femininity and started creating women that were fatter, hairier, and in her words, uglier. So the question remains – are they any less womanly?
It was by fluke that a few weeks ago, I heard Allyson being interviewed on Q with Jian Ghomeshi on CBC Radio, and her ideas lingered. I’ve been thinking about who she is, what she does, and what she says since then. She claims the titles of fat activist and queer activist. She coined the term Deep Lez to name the movement that works to maintain radical lesbianism. She makes art that I don’t want to hang over my sofa, but that I want to look at often because it stimulates my thinking. It draws out questions. It makes me wonder. Damn you Allyson.
Each time I find that place where I feel like I understand women a little better, someone pushes me to look further. Much of this digging comes from my own need to understand myself better, in turn, I receive the gift of seeing women differently. If I had looked at Allyson’s work a year ago, I might not have seen anything. Or perhaps I would have only seen ugly in her work, because it’s what I often saw in myself. Today, her work doesn’t help me find beauty, instead, it helps me ask new questions. Perhaps in a year or a decade, I’ll look at it again, and see something fresh. I know that in that time, I’ll continue to look at her work and be provoked into re-thinking what I think I know. Damn you Allyson. |
Trudi Evans |
| About the author: |
| Trudi Evans is the publisher of As We Are Magazine and an active member of the board of directors for the Eating Disorders Action Group. Her interests range from politics and writing to environmentalism and mixed-berry cobblers. She resides in Nova Scotia with her spouse Rob, their son Sam, and Sam’s cat Hero. |
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