Lady Sasquatch art in Toronto

By David Pescovitz at 8:45 am Friday, Sep 23

At Toronto's Paul Petro Contemporary Art Gallery, Allyson Mitchell is exhibiting her "Lady Sasquatch" series of works. Wall hangings, constructed from faux fur and found textiles, and a bigfoot diorama are "about myths, female sexuality and fun/fear." The pieces were influenced, Mitchell says, by vintage porn magazines. From The Globe And Mail:

"Lady Sasquatch is your dream girl only bigger and hairier," she writes, "and she might eat you if you don't look out."

Mitchell's latest she-creatures are a departure from her earlier fun-fur pinups, sporting snouts and fangs, and baring their multiple teats and fur-rimmed genitalia with daunting (or hilarious, depending on your sensibility) vitality. In one wall hanging, a symphony of reds, a woolly she-creature bays at the moon.In another wall piece, worked up in oranges and golds, a Sasquatch giantess takes a licking from her nude female cohort, who is buried face-first in her lap. "These images were originally made by men for men," she says, referring to her soft-porn sources. "As a straight woman, you are not supposed to see them, and, as a dyke, I'm sure as shit not supposed to see them. I wanted to take those images back, to take the shame away..."

On the hair front, Mitchell says enlightenment came with an issue of Penthouse back in the eighties, when she was a teen camp counsellor in the Ontario woods. "We were definitely in Sasquatch land, there," she remembers with a laugh. "I remember all the boys drove into town to get the new issue with Madonna in it. . . . And I remember she had armpit hair."

Link (Thanks, Loren Coleman!)