Allyson Mitchell

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.

In 2010, Mitchell cofounded Feminist Art Gallery with Deirdre Logue.

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.

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.

In 1996, Mitchell cofounded the fat activist and performance art collective, Pretty Porky and Pissed Off with Ruby Rowan and Mariko Tamaki.

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.