Making Ladies 2010

Directed by Lesley Loksi Chan

A documentary about maximalist Toronto media artist and sculptor Allyson Mitchell as she preps her Ladies Sasquatch installation – a fake fur creature wonderland. The large-bodied sasquatch ladies are feminist exclamation marks and icons, celebrating their “different bodies,” as the artist explains in a winning voice-over that drives the movie. Thrift store accumulations and found handicrafts are repurposed, blurring ideas of craft and art, high and low. How to turn what is overlooked, discarded and without value, or even feared and despised, and put these bodies at the centre of a new conversation? Mitchell’s work provides a blueprint for how to love our monsters.