Allyson Mitchell is a Canadian maximalist artist working with all kinds of unique mediums- sculpture, performance, installation and film. Her practice combines feminism and pop culture to investigate contemporary ideas about the body, sexuality, and autobiography. She uses reclaimed textile and abandoned craft to tell her story. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals across Canada, the US, Europe and East Asia, including the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, the Andy Warhol Museum, and Walker Art Center. Mitchell’s work is also held in McMaster University, Queen’s University, and the National Library and Archives of Canada.

Mitchell is the creator of The Feminist Art Gallery - “a response, a process, a site, a protest, an outcry, an exhibition, a performance, an economy, a conceptual framework, a place and an opportunity.”

Link to FAG:

http://www.allysonmitchell.com/project.html?project=fag

FILMOGRAPHY:

Afghanimation, 2008

Foodie, 2008

Unca Trans, 2007

If Anyone Should Happen.., 2003

Glitter, 2003

Precious Little Tiny Love, 2003

Bon Bon, 2001

My Life in 5 Minutes, 2000

Cup Cake, 1998

Chow Down, 1997

For more information on Allyson Mitchell, please visit her website: http://www.allysonmitchell.com

MK: First off, I’d like to start with: how do you define the terms “experimental” and “feminist”? What do they mean to you? Do you identify with them? Why or why not?

AM: I do identify with both of those but definitely with a few footnotes. So, especially experimental because I think the definition of experimental filmmaker is so rooted in masculine filmmaking traditions. I don’t really see my work as coming out of those schools. I see it much more informed by Micro Art scenes like Riot Grrl and DIY art movements from the 1990s in particular. As well as some of the ideas that came out of lesbian feminists from the 1970s--with the idea of making our own culture to tell our own stories. The reason why I do identify as an experimental filmmaker is because the films I have made a lot of the times are process based- meaning I don't necessarily have the end product predetermined when I set out to make the work. The work is much more about experimenting with a medium and an idea and seeing what comes out of that and pulling something together afterwards.

Yeah, I definitely identify as feminist. It’s hard to have a simple definition for feminism, but the feminisms that I hope to engage with or practice are not based strictly in gender, but also incorporate different sites of analysis and resistance around class, race, ability, and sexuality as well as gender.

MK: When did you first have an interest in creating feminist work? What catapulted your creation of installations and filmmaking?

AM: I don’t have a single origin story, it’s kind of a cumulation that involves finding community and finding art scenes-- like queer art scenes in Toronto-- and learning about methods of making film and art that weren’t dependent on necessarily having training in doing those things or being highly skilled at them. Also, connecting with people who were emboldened to make art to express themselves and also to interrupt cultural messages within sexuality. Queer women in particular who really encouraged me to pick up the tools for making culture, like Super 8 cameras or musical intruments or my own body to contribute and to resist. And then it just expanded from there.

I didn't grow up in a family that was very connected to the arts, although it was definitely a family of makers. So craft and making things was definitely part of my growing up.

But it wasn't fine art. So I never really had that language, or I didn't know that I could join that world. It was kind of a slow and long process of figuring it out. I also started really very much in making kind of craft based things and also making culture for activism. So making stickers on a photocopier and things like that to interrupt mainstream messages about fat bodies or about lesbian visibility, that kind of thing. I didn't really see it as like, I'm going to have an art show. It was more like I’m working with a group of people to try and fuck with this idea. So what are some ways that we can do that? Is it going to be a dance performance outside on a busy intersection? Or is it going to be making some stickers? Is it going to be experimenting with some super 8 film? It wasn't as intentional as maybe some other trajectories into fine art, it was a slow build. I was also studying gender studies and queer studies as an undergraduate. And I was really excited about the ideas that I was learning about. It was really blowing my mind. But I also felt like there were limitations of access to the ideas, because I was learning them in an academic setting. So sometimes the language didn't feel super accessible, or just like, how do you even get those books? It became exciting to me to try and translate some of those ideas that I was learning in classrooms and the university into other modes of expression beyond academic words.

MK: I see you have many installations, films, and performances exhibiting your artwork. What medium do you feel most comfortable expressing yourself in and why?

AM: I do not, I do not and I shall not choose. I identify as a maximalist artist which means like I feel like I can take from whatever medium makes the most sense for me or I'm most interested in at the time. I don't have one that is the most comfortable or the easiest. Sometimes I switch and try something else, because I think it will make life a bit easier, but then find out actually, it's just as hard going from video to analog film, for example, or something like that. I don't have to affiliate with one method of art making only. It depends on what is grabbing my interest at the time, it fluctuates.

MK: Can you explain your connection with Venus and why you chose her for many of your sculptures? What does she represent?

AM: Well, one of the first figures or representations of bodies that really blew my mind was the Venus of Willendorf, which is I think like 40,000 years old. It's a fat woman, or like, I don't know if it's a woman but their body has a big butt, big breasts-- is corpulent, and it fits in the palm of your hands. It’s ancient. It comes potentially from matriarchal cultures that were completely organized around different ways of being in the world than this contemporary, patriarchal, white, capitalist society that we find ourselves in. And so, she has always been a touchstone for me as knowing that different kinds of bodies than the bodies that were used to always seeing have always existed and were even valorized and seen as deities potentially even, and honored and loved and seen as important. And the fact that that little figure is so old, but still survives and holds so much potential. It requires that we use our imaginations to think of different worlds or different ways of being. So that's really exciting and kind of blows my mind, and has always stayed with me and always been a touchstone in that way. And then, the way we think about art history and the way that certain types of women's bodies have been simultaneously objectified and valued. But at the same time, women haven't been able to be subjects or have agency. Venus is a really easy and obvious place to start thinking about the representation of women in art history and history period in the Western world.

And also it rhymes with penis. So that's kind of hilarious. Some bizarre dichotomy in a culture where we are set up and we understand the world and these binaries. It's kind of like a joke, and naughty and sexual. I like the idea of playing with how easily our understanding of something can flip.

MK: How do you feel you resurrect the term “lesbian” and how did you first go about this?

AM: It's always been a piece of how I make culture. When I was 27, and I went through my Saturn Returns, and I came out, it was around the same time that I was figuring out that I could be an artist, or at least make art. Those two things happened at exactly the same time for me, and it completely changed my perspective of what I could be and who I was in the world. Those things for me will always be very connected. Queerness, being a lesbian, and making art. So, in a sense, I feel like I never really was resurrecting, it was always something I was exploring. MK: What is your favorite work you have created? Which has the deepest personal significance to you?

AM: The lesbian feminist haunted house is the biggest project that I've ever done. It has the most significance because it's taken up the most space in my life for the past 7 years. If you think about planning and organizing, it's more like eight or nine, so I can be rough and call it 10 years. Yeah, it's epic. And it's something that I do in collaboration with my partner, Deirdre. So it's something that when we do it, it takes over our whole lives. And it is so large because of the number of performers and people who we collaborate with and also the scale of the installation; it's like 10 art shows happening simultaneously. It's also conceptually very complicated. So trying to figure out a way to have a sex positive, queer, feminist, contemporary art event in a way that honors lots of different lives and different political positions and can hold a lot of complicated queer and feminist histories and the contemporary, queer and feminist moment of right now at the same time, while also being funny and beautiful and crafty and accessible. It takes over our whole lives trying to figure out how to make that happen. And pay all the artists who collaborate. So yeah, that's the biggest thing I think I've ever done and potentially ever will do, as a singular art event.

MK: That's incredible.

AM: Yeah, it's kind of impossible.

MK: It is so impressive you have left a geographical footprint within your feminist work! How was the process of creating the Feminist Artist Gallery (FAG) and can you elaborate on the name you chose a little bit?

AM: Well, we always like to say that it was an irresistible acronym. The Feminist Art Gallery is really didactic and very straightforward, but the acronym of FAG kind of messes with that and makes it less readable in the way that people often interpret feminist as being specifically related to women's issues. So we were hoping by calling it fag, first of all, it's funny. It's queer. And it also destabilizes the term feminist in a way that makes it not just about like, quote unquote, women's art or women's culture. We had felt really a bit frustrated at the time, this is more than 10 years ago, about what was happening in terms of what or whose art was being seen in Toronto, and so we've had lots of times where we would be complaining with different people about the situation. My partner Deirdre Logue and I decided to do something instead of just complaining about it. We wanted to have a space, and we brought people together to talk about what that space would be like and what it could be like. We tore down kind of a shack in our backyard and built a building that would be partly for us for a studio and partly as an art gallery. And we imagined that it would be this thing that we would be able to do whatever we wanted. We didn't have to ask for permission. We said we would have like four art shows a year, and then the first year we ended up having something like 20 events, because people really were interested in it, really excited about it. And so yeah, it was a very exciting thing to do as a project, to intentionally create community around connecting people through visual art and events. That was outside of the commercial gallery system and outside of the museum system and even outside of artist run culture, which is a big thing in Canada, artist run cultures. It started in the 70s in Canada, but it's become a bit institutionalized. So we saw ourselves as trying to create a different model. We didn't have any funding from the government, so we tried to do our own kind of crowdsourcing to fund and pay artists for their exhibitions.

MK: In your piece Glitter, how did you come up with the costumes and choreography to exhibit lesbian glamour?

AM: Haha! Well, the costumes my friend, Christina Zeidler, who I made the film with...we found them at a thrift store. We've always done a lot of thrift store and junk shop scrounging to find the materials for things that I make. So at the time, we were collaborating a lot as a collective called Free Show Seymour, and we were at a thrift store and we found those costumes they were matching, so it was like--no brainer! We were also experimenting with animation and photography. And we had this camera called a Holga camera, which is like a toy camera from maybe the 1950s, 60s, it was like a little plastic cheap camera. But it does have a hole in the camera, so that it has a really interesting light leak. We didn’t have a storyboard with a sketch of like, we have to find these exact costumes. And then we have to do these dance moves. It was more like, we were experimenting with the camera and also what it felt like to do something weird, like what we were doing in a public space. We were in a very small town, just driving around looking for sites to experiment with those cameras. And we came across this flea market and we just changed into those costumes in the car. And then one of us would stand at the end of the aisle and take very quick shots and advance, shot, and advance, shot and advance. And then the other person would do it. And then we thought of those things as animation cells, because when you're shooting animation with analog film, there's a certain number of frames per second. And so we knew if we could shoot really quickly and get a lot of frames happening, then we could use each of those photographs as an animation cell. So yeah, we shot it on 16 millimeter on an animation stand at the film CoOp called LIFT here in Toronto. And shot a few like a few frames of each single one of those still shots, and that's what makes the motion happen. We created the music afterwards and put it with the piece, which when we saw it projected after we shot it, we could see that it looked like a dance but it wasn't like us intending to be making a dance. It was us doing this kind of goofy, odd queer physical movement in an unconventional space to be doing that kind of performance and then seeing what happens. And what happened? Lesbian glamour.

MK: That's incredible. Yeah, I'm definitely learning a lot about process in this class and working and collaborating with other people. You know, everyone has such a different process and so some of my friends have like such an organized storyboard and I just don't do that. I can't do that.

AM: And one is not better than the other, but they definitely can bring very different results. And maybe sometimes you want to do things where you really plan it out, which I have done as well. And then other times, you want the freedom to just like mess around with a medium and see what kind of magic or non-magic can happen. Because, as an artist, you really need to explore in order to understand the process of like, how this camera works. So maybe we shot like 20 rolls that day, but only those two were the ones that were really that something came out of that we could understand to make a piece out of.

MK: What inspired you to create My Life in Five Minutes- why did you choose this format?

AM: The motivation for that was I was invited to do this thing in 1999. The Canadian Broadcast Corporation, or the CBC here in Toronto, they were doing this project where they were commissioning artists and they gave you a fee. And I think I got like $500 or something, which at the time was like a lot of money to me. And the project was to get artists to make work under the idea of “my life in five minutes.” So I took it very literally. And so, I wanted to like very literally tell an autobiographical story of my life so far, and I used stills and I interspersed them with these drawings that I had made called 55 Things That Tried to Kill Me, where I was trying to do these paintings that copy those Big Eyed Girl paintings from the 1970s. One of the artists that was most famous for making them is Margaret Keane; they were kitschy and they were kind of sad and sweet and vulnerable. And I really liked these paintings. They were also one of the first mass produced paintings that people acquired for their homes. I was trying to figure out what my artist voice was, and one of the things I started to do was make these paintings that were supposed to be like those Big Eyed Girls, but they were really terrible and they look nothing like them. But I kept making them and just decided to kind of embrace that failure, and make those girls each one about something that had been kind of difficult for me from like, really serious things like my grandmother having cancer or an eating disorder, to more kinda like, innocuous, dumb things like a sharp crumb in your bed or, you know, or a failed attempt at writing a grant or something. It was like a combination of the real hard life-changing things and also just the day to day bumps and survivable difficulties, like stubbing your toe and stuff like that. Anyway, so interspersing those big eyed girls with photographs from my family in my life and myself and that song that goes along with it is kind of sad. So it also has this melancholy or kind of bittersweet sense to the film, which is also something that I really love. That kind of complicated emotional terrain that's not just like sugar sweet and everything's fine, but also like insisting on holding on to the difficult things and the complicated parts about being a human in the world, even when they seem ridiculous. Yeah, so that's the film I made.

MK: Wow, that's really relatable. That's awesome.

MK: How does animation or stop motion give life to your work? Why do you choose this over talking head or other form of narration?

AM: Well, I have done those other types as well. But part of the reason why animation is prevalent in my work is because that was one of the first places where I learned to make something. So I took a workshop at LIFT, it's called the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, in how to use an animation stand. I had done a little bit of Super 8 filming the year before, and just kind of started to get familiar with how to use a Super 8 camera. And it was a thing in the 90s where lots of people were experimenting, like it had kind of made a comeback. I mean Super 8, it's maybe never really gone away, but it was a much more used method in the 60s and 70s. And then artists kind of returned to it because it was inexpensive and gritty and allowed for really beautiful saturated film and images. And so I took a workshop at LIFT because I had played around with the Super 8, but I knew I wanted to figure out more about the technique and the skill and I love animation.

And I also had tried to do a video where I worked with some actors, and I made this really kind of bad documentary called Bad Brownies. It was kind of trying to do a traditional documentary, where I recorded women who had claimed to have been kicked out of Brownies when they were kids for being badasses. I got their stories, and then I had these two little girls kind of act out the scenario of these “bad brownies,” and I did not like that experience. I thought like it wasn't really very good. It wasn't a medium that I was really all that interested in. I also did not like working with actors. I found it weird and not my thing. But it was something I tried. Because of the unpredictability of film, unless you are working on a more professional set, it gets complicated with the expectations of other people enacting your art for you. Well, I didn't have that much experience. I was just figuring things out, I have a lot more experience now.

But also, animation seemed so much more appealing, because it could be just me or me and somebody else in a room for as long as I wanted. I didn't have to worry about people needing to take breaks or providing lunch or like, you know, having an eight hour work day or anything like that, or paying people--like, it was affordable, independent. It was like my own agency and I could create a world. I also like how with animation, you can create a mystical, magical world by moving an object around really slowly and taking a bunch of pictures of it. You can make things like candy, or dolls come to life and tell a story, and I find that really compelling. Like I really love also looking at animation. I think it's incredible and exciting and crafty. It's much more stitching things together than knowing how to be an incredible oil painter or something.

MK: What fuels your creative motivations? How do you deal with any loss of passion or ruts in your creative life?

AM: That's a good question. I've always been afraid after I did a big project or had a big art exhibition or completed a big film or something that I'd lost it, like that might be the last thing-- where am I going to get an idea again? And that has not happened. I'm now 53. So I'm not worried about that happening. But something that I have always done in order to keep things going is to say yes to things and do small projects in between the big ones, even if it's something that is not related like the same medium. So you know, you're interested in filmmaking, if you're interested in animation...I don't know if you're interested in craft, but I do think that things like crocheting, and knitting have a lot of affinity to animation because every stitch is similar to every cell of a film frame. So it's interesting to do different things with your mind and your body to understand, not necessarily directly, but indirectly how something works. I think it's good to keep small projects going when you feel like you're not working on the big thing. It's okay to work on the big film project, that's your big dream. But you can also have some little things going along at the same time, whether they're like Tik Tok videos or whatever. So maybe you're stitching something, doing some embroidery or whatever; I just think that that stuff can be kind of fun to be doing simultaneously. I do really believe that it makes different neurons fire in our brains so that we can understand filmmaking better. You can learn how to do crochet, or macaroni or something from a YouTube video, or use like that plastic canvas stitching, whatever. And by the haptic motion of the repetitive craft thing, which has lots of similarities to filmmaking, it allows a left side right side brain thing to happen differently. You know how sometimes you remember things that you forgot while you're driving or when you're in the shower? Or doing the dishes? It's like that. You're concentrating on this thing, and it's still productive, but you're also thinking about this other thing over here. It can give you lots of ideas.

MK: Oh, that's really interesting. I'll have to do that. I've never thought of doing that.

AM: Many things, not just the big ones, because the big things can burn you out. And also they feel like they take forever, like if you're working on a film that takes three years. You need to feel like something else happened during those three years.

MK: Right. You need to feel fulfilled in some other way.

AM: Yeah.

MK: I feel like since feminism is such a broad topic, and it's hard to properly define, and then it's also going through so many changes over time, like there's the second wave, third wave. Do you feel that your work reflects these changes from work to work?

AM: Yes, I do. Especially with the haunted house: we have done it now three times, and each time it has shifted and changed according to how queer politics have shifted and feminist politics have shifted. So the first one that we did was in 2013, and now the most recent one we did was in 2019. There's a world of difference between what were the things that were of concern. And also there's some of the exact same things for queer, feminist, and politicized communities from 2013 to 2019. Also at the same time, it's weird, because something that you make in 1999, if it still exists, then what you were expressing and how well you did it, or how poorly you did it, still exists in 2020. Sometimes it doesn't hold up politically. It's kind of the risk you take when you make a bold statement. You just hope that it holds up or that people are forgiving.

MK: How do you feel your work has changed as you have matured as an artist?

AM: I really believe that what I know will always be changing. I'll always be learning and shifting, not just as an individual, but also culturally, so I think you have to keep moving. I never feel like I can rest solidly like, this is what I think about this one thing now and it's unchangeable. It's not--you learn new things. You learn different perspectives, different voices come to the table, and you learn about the blind spots that are sometimes your own fault for willfully ignoring things. These a lot of the times are also because growing up in a white supremacist, middle class, colonized world perspective, there's things that are huge holes in our education. That's why I would never feel comfortable thinking what I think right now will be exactly the same thing ten years from now because there's whole other worlds to learn about. In some ways I can see, my artist's voice has definitely grown in my capacity to do larger projects. And I know more people and I have more cultural capital and I am connected to a community that's very different than 20 plus years ago, when I was just learning about art. But, at the same time, I feel like some of my aesthetics are very similar. They might be more sophisticated or larger in scale, or informed by different things, but sometimes I can see the aesthetic is very similar. Like styles change, but I can definitely see that my voice has a similar presence.

MK: Does the public’s perception influence your work as an artist?

AM: Yeah, in some ways it does. A lot of the things that I have made are about inviting people to experience something. And so with the installations that I've made and things like that, each time I've done one, I've learned something about how people interact with things. Using humor when I make films is a way of gathering a response from an audience, so if they laugh at the things that I thought were meant to be funny, then I learned something about the relationship between my intention and what I did. But if they laugh at things that I wasn't really thinking were funny, then I also learn something different about how people respond to things. Within a dark cinema, when you're sitting and watching short films with an audience, you actually hear people respond in the dark by laughing. Then it's an immediate feedback loop. With the installations that I've made, where I'm asking people to go inside of something that's creating an environment, I've learned if you put lots of pillows around, and you lower the ceiling so people have to get down, they will sit down. They'll spend more time with the art, because they're not just walking by it or walking through it. If it’s cozy and comfortable, people will stick around for longer. All of these things I learned over the years about how people respond to things, and I have a certain kind of understanding of, when you build a building in your backyard and proclaim it to be a queer feminist space, who might come? Who might be interested in that? What they might do when they're there? What kind of things do they need, like drinks and washrooms and toilet paper? Over the years, yes, I do respond to how the public perceives work. I can decide how to tend to that, how to accommodate people, how to be nimble in the politics so that things can shift to larger feedback loops.

MK: How do you navigate representation within the feminist community? Because that's something that I kind of feel hesitant about, in terms of expressing myself just in this class specifically. I don't want to say the wrong thing or like, be too privileged in what I'm saying. Do you deal with that at all? If so, how do you deal with it?

AM: Yeah, I mean, sometimes a way around that is to literally not take up that space. So just listening to people and not being the first person to shoot your hand up. And sometimes it's hard if you have enthusiasm and excitement about something. But when you grow up with white privilege, I think sometimes that can give people a sense of confidence and entitlement to space. So just try and be conscious of that and listen and don't jump in right away. That's one way to deal with it, is to just like not do it. But at the same time, it's important that you share your views and your ideas. I mean, in a university setting, you're supposed to be doing that, and sometimes you're probably going to get slapped down, because you're going to make mistakes, you're learning, you don't know everything. So not everything you say can be perfect. But if you try to do some of the work of understanding your own position and coming at things with a really open heart and mind, as opposed to thinking you know or being pre-determined in what your views are, you can learn from other people. But also, that stuff is tricky. I'm not gonna say that it's not. That stuff is tricky.

To try and figure out our way through so many complicated positions and to force ourselves to be in brave spaces where people actually talk to each other, as opposed to just scream at each other from different corners of the internet. Sometimes there’ll be spaces where you feel safer than others, and sometimes that will have nothing to do with you, but has to do with having a teacher who creates that space and moderates well, and makes sure that everybody has a voice and feels comfortable. Sometimes there will be people in your classes who are jerks, from all different positions. So you gotta kind of pick your fights sometimes. And just sit back and learn.

MK: Can you give any advice to a college student today?

AM: About what I would say about being an artist? Hmm.

MK: Because it's kind of hard to navigate, especially when you're first starting out, I think.

AM: Yeah, for sure. Some advice I would give would be to be fearless. And try not to be uptight about what people will think about you. Find the people that you want to work with because they either align with you or make you grow in terms of politics. And that can be challenging as well. You want people that you trust, and that you want to hang out with. And that you want to, like, physically be around and work with them. And sometimes that means leaving home to go to where they are. Try to be brave about putting yourself into situations that you feel are intimidating. And I don't mean putting yourself into danger. You know, I mean, like, if being around queer people freaks you out and you think you're queer, then be around queer people.

You want to be an artist?

MK: Sort of, I'm in filmmaking. So it just feels less directional than like, if you were to major in, I don't know, science or something like that.

AM: Well, it's definitely even more directional than a liberal arts degree.

MK: That's true.

AM: Yeah, because you have a skill. So while you're in university, max out on everything. Like, don't fuck around. You've gotten access to probably equipment and interesting people, and some of your professors are going to be boring and burnt out. But other ones are going to make you fly, and learn as much from them as possible, like actually do the readings they tell you to do. And also go to the screenings. Don't stay home and watch TV. Like go out into the world and actually find the thing that really interests you. Just keep looking at it and engaging with it. But also, look around at who your cohort is, because there's probably a few real gems in there. And they're going to be the people who continue and you'll gather more to travel through your life with. Figure out who those people are and why.

MK: That's really good advice. Thank you.

AM: And everything that you think you know, you're right.

Really, everything you think you know, in your gut, you can trust.

This interview was conducted via Zoom from Santa Cruz, California to Toronto, Canada on February 16th, 2020 and then published March 15th, 2020. Mia Francesca Knox is a Film and Digital Media undergraduate student at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is in her fourth year and is in the production concentration, hoping to graduate Spring of 2020. She was a part of Irene Lusztig’s Feminist Filmmaking class in Winter of 2020.