Virginia Mitford | She Danced Her Way In & Other Work

Sep 28

Virginia Mitford
She Danced Her Way In
& Other Work

Edge Gallery, October 2 - 31, 2020

In my larger art practice, repetitive and physically involved processes of making help me to orient myself within an overwhelming store of experience and emotion while looking to the present as a renewed source of meaning. Through printmaking and drawing, dance, animation and performance, I revisit my past in varying ways, paying close attention to the impact of actions involved in art-making on the emotional life of a memory. For instance, by reenacting and exaggerating the awkward ways I have presented myself through clothing and movement throughout my life, I untangle convoluted emotions and memories around my body with vulnerability and humour. My self portraiture challenges double standards in our society regarding how womxn are expected to look and behave, considering the pejorative phrase 'letting yourself go' to be a conscious and deliberate act. I like to focus on those moments when my body, in the face of a multitude of constrictive judgments and standards, reveals itself unabashedly through the cover of clothing.

My most recent project She danced her way in continues to use my own bodily experience & movement as a reference. However, this project focuses on the womxn--particularly dance hall girls and sex workers--who have been alternately silenced, glorifed and vilifed by the popular, male dominated Gold Rush narrative. I attempt to undermine these tired and destructive patterns of language and belief that tend to pathologize womxn's bodies and sexuality, instead imagining a new visual language that considers what these womxn could have dreamed, felt and desired. Each mutoscope animates and pays quiet homage to one of the two young womxn in an historic photograph from that era. The mutoscope, an early cinematic device which was often used in the late 1800s/early 1900s to show film of exotic dancers, conveys ideas of voyeurism and control in its very design and history. As we turn the crank to flip through frames, we become part of the artwork and maybe can also consider where we fit into a problematic and frequently retold story. I wish, in at least a some small way, to undermine those historic belief systems that still make womxn and other people of marginalized genders feel unsafe within their own community and uncomfortable in their own skin.

IN THE NEWS
Yukon News, New Arts Underground shows feature paintings of strangers, dreams of gold rush-era dance hall girls
CBC Radio One Whitehorse, Yukon artist Virginia Mitford on her latest exhibition
Whitehorse Star, Mutoscope Part of Exhibit

VIRGINIA MITFORD
Virginia Mitford is an emerging artist living in a cabin in the central Yukon. Having grown up on a remote trapline on the Stewart River with her family and sled dogs, her work always draws from her connection to her history and to the land around her. Working with printmaking, dance, animation and drawing, she navigates discomfort and awkwardness and other emotionally-laden ideas with a focus on movement and the body. Graduating from Memorial University with a BFA in 2013, has since taken part in multiple artist residencies in Montreal, across Newfoundland and the Yukon. In 2017, while as artist in residence at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture and later on the Chilkoot Trail, she worked on and conceptualized both bodies of work shown in this exhibition. She is the recipient of multiple awards and grants and has been an active member of artist run centres, print shops and galleries wherever she resides.

She danced her way in has been funded by the Yukon’s Advanced Artist Award and a Canada Council Research and Creation Grant.

Website:
virginiamitford.wordpress.com