Allyson Mitchell’s Ladies Sasquatch

While there were two brilliant exhibitions of contemporary art opening this past Thursday at the McMaster Museum of Art, I’ve elected to dedicate a separate post to each rather than jam them together into some freaky hybrid of fun fur and oil paint. Consider this my attempt to make up for the lack of posts in the last couple weeks.

So, leading off today is Allyson Mitchell’s sculptural installation Ladies Sasquatch in the Sherman Gallery, i.e. that big open space when you first go in off the lobby. Don’t worry, you’ll know you’re in the right place on account of the giant sasquatches.

I have to admit that I’d already had my interest stoked by the preview images circulating around before the fact, but none of those do any justice whatsoever to the presence of these gargantuan* beings or the uneasiness of seeing them gathered together in a sparsely lit covenant that forces the viewer to shuffle directly into their circle in order to have a proper look at their faces and become subject to their gazes in turn.

Spatially, Mitchell’s sasquatches are confrontational, but her use of materials undermines that expectation with something more inclusive and almost comforting. Patches of shag carpet and outdated furniture upholstery - those especially ugly florals and fringes of the sixties and seventies - serve as warming layers of fur on some of the beasts, and explicitly cushion their large, clawed feet. These are fierce and unapologetic works celebrating a powerful female sexuality, but they are welcoming despite their bared teeth.

Much of that sense of play is evoked in the many pink critters that are given leave to frolic amongst the five sasquatches, making their homes on shoulders and paws with a symbiosis that strongly reminds me of the smaller creatures conspiring with David Altmejd’s Giants in The Index. There are, in fact, striking parallels between these two artists’ stagings of sexuality at a feral yet familiar point between nature and civilization, both possessed of a fine tension that I find most apparent in this moment of a nursing dog-creature sheltered between the massive heel of a dangerously poised foot.

However, while Altmejd owes a considerable debt to minimalism’s sleek surfaces and cubic forms, Allyson Mitchell describes herself as a ‘maximalist’ artist, which is a frankly brilliant act of self-identification for those of us quite happy to regard minimalism as a useful but done thing. Her appreciation for craft and substance is wildly evident in the finesse of her finely detailed creatures, each meticulously constructed and anointed with suggestive pink fur in all the right places.

Ladies Sasquatch is on display until March 21, running concurrently with Matthew Varey’s Building on History, which will be coming up in the next post.

* ‘”The amount of venom that can be delivered from a single bite can be gargantuan.” You know, I’ve always liked that word… ”gargantuan”… so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence.’ - Elle Driver, Kill Bill, Vol. 2

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