A couple of years ago, I wandered into Paul Petro Contemporary Art and was greeted by a seven-foot-tall naked female Sasquatch. She was sort of like those big plush Hanna Barbera characters you see at Canada’s Wonderland, only naked, full of styrofoam and way taller. With her giant hips, tits, and lips, Big Trubs exuded some serious power. On the walls around her were shag rugs depicting her female Big Foot friends in various states of undressed activity. My very favourite piece involved two carpeted ladies engaged in carpet munching, titled “It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself.” Which is like, totally true.

Covered in flammable fun fur, Big Trubs is the work of Allyson Mitchell, a local multidisciplinary artist whose work explores queer, lesbian and feminist themes. Mitchell, who also teaches at York, manages to be simultaneously super-smart and completely hilarious. So I was happy to hear that Big Trubs and friends are on display again at the Textile Museum of Canada. If you haven’t been to the Textile Museum yet, it’s time to go. There’s lots of cool contemporary stuff there and besides, textile work is ancient, creative and labour intensive, so stop being such an art snob. Mitchell’s pieces are part of “Close to You: Contemporary Textiles, Intimacy and Popular Culture,” a group exhibition that’s on until October 12.

Other than the Sasquatches, my favourite works were quilts by Ai Kijima—the Japanese-born New Yorker has assembled complex fabric collages of found materials by heat-fusing her chosen scraps together, then quilting each rainbow-bright image individually. The result is a big cartoonish landscape that looks childish but deals with very adult themes, juxtaposing Thomas the Tank Engine with military vehicles with creepy wide-eyed kittens and a sexy chick from Las Vegas. 

Also clever are Mark Newport’s full-size hand knit superhero outfits, made to fit his own body, which had me pondering masculinity, gender construction and whether Spiderman could successfully fight crime if he was clad in 100% acrylic. I’ve been really into embroidery lately, so I also appreciated Michèle Provost’s hand-stitched samplers, which take an old-school technique and make it modern: instead of the alphabet or biblical psalms, her hand-embroidered letters spell out provocative lyrics to popular pop songs of the last three decades. Scott Kildall’s video piece “Handwork” is an homage to Andy Warhol’s “Blow Job”—take a guess what his hands are doing outside the frame.

I sat in as Mitchell and Provost spoke about their artistic process, and so learned that Big Trubs and her clan came into being when Mitchell was pondering the idea of a feminist centerfold: whether it could exist, and what it might look like. She also managed to mention taxidermy and the girls of “The Hills” in the same breath—love it. Both artists discussed the tactile quality of textile art, and how the intimacy of working on a labour of love is its own form of self-pleasure. Although “It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself” wasn’t part of this particular exhibition, the lesbian Sasquatches have taught me lessons I will always remember in my heart.