Allyson Mitchell Hungry Purse: The Vagina Dentata in Late Capitalism 2004

“The vagina dentata is an archetype that is found in numerous cultures and geographies over different time periods. It is a pervasive image and trope. Freud didn't speak of the vagina dentata directly but he, and many other psychoanalytic theorists, did (and do) talk about the fears that the vagina represents for individuals and cultures: fear of death; fear of castration; fear of female sexuality; fear of the feminized body; fear of voracious appetites. This installation is approximately 250 square feet in size. It consists of a pink entry tunnel that leads to an "other" space completely covered with tactile, textile materials. The crocheted doorway is constructed to represent a large vulva, complete with labia major, minor and polyester plant-hanger pubic hair.”

Allyson Mitchell, A Girl’s Journey into the Well of Forbidden Knowledge, 2010

Mitchell preserves a world that is rapidly disappearing with the loss of feminist institutions such as presses, record labels, and bookstores. She joins a younger generation of lesbian artists who have been not only using the archive for inspiration but making art as a way of making an activist archive. Ulrike Müller’s Herstory Inventory, for example, began as an audio installation based on a reading of a list describing the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ T-shirt collection, and Müller is now commissioning artists to create new designs based on the descriptions. Other examples include Tammy Rae Carland’s photographs of queer and feminist books and riot grrrl cassette tapes in “An Archive of Feelings”; Onya Hogan- Finlay’s exhibition “My Taste in Men,” which incorporates materials from the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California; and the Mobile Homecoming Project and Catherine Lord’s dedication pages described in this issue’s Moving Image Review on lesbian archives. Artists are re-creating queer archives to bring them to affective life beyond the closed stacks and to create new publics.

Allyson Mitchell, The Fluff Stands Alone, 2003