Anonymous Montreal-based artist Ambivalently Yours (AY) had humble beginnings in social media before her 80,000 followers on Instagram.
An online feminist presence, AY incorporates splashes of pink surrealism throughout her art, featuring inspirational and ambivalent text alongside it.
Her career began on Tumblr, with AY posting pictures of notes that she left in public places.
The notes were directed at things that “made her feel ambivalent”—money, a skirt, and even the Jersey Shore store.
Recently, AY visited Carleton to lead a zine workshop at Carleton as part of Sexual Assault Awareness Week.
The inspiration behind her art came from the in-between space in which AY struggled to find herself and create art.
For her, she was torn between the fashion industry, where she worked at the time, and the art school where she created feminist art.
“Working in fashion was killing my soul,” she said. She added that the culture within her workplace was demeaning, and she felt that her and her colleagues were being forced to compete rather than work together.
She said any attempts to challenge the existing practices were met with derision at her “feminist ideas.”
On the other hand, while her feminist ideas were wholly embraced at art school, Ambivalently Yours said she felt that she had to reject femininity itself.
Her favourite colour was pink, but she said her professors were against it as it was “too girly.”
She said she was an “in-betweener”—lacking any sense of belonging.
It was in this in-between space that she found inspiration.
The thesis of AY began with this idea—“can I be a feminist while loving the colour pink? Can you explore femininity without rejecting feminism?”
She said ambivalence is the coexistence of two emotions—active ambivalence is the idea that, in any case of contradiction, you can be “both and neither—not define yourself by either one.”
AY aims to change this idea of not belonging with active ambivalence—by ignoring the binaries in place.
“We can live within systems and still fight them,” she said. “We can’t grow any other way.”
The art of AY is unapologetically feminine. AY explains that she doesn’t want to reject femininity with her work, she wants to “reject what society has associated with femininity.”
Rather than becoming any perfect ideal, AY preaches ‘un-becoming’—acknowledging those areas of ambivalence.
Her art strives to embody this idea as well, with soft pink colour palettes and grotesque imagery. The images are very surreal and abstract. AY explains that she hopes to portray mental illness this way—surreal and abstract, drawing on the way it feels like to be in our bodies.
“Mental illness is seen as very interior thing, but really, it has very physical characteristics,” she said.
The concept of the in-between has followed AY ever since.
“I think the most important thing about feminism is that it’s not a unified thing,” she said. “It’s a mistake to define it, as it’s constantly moving and evolving. You can’t ask one person to define it—if you asked me 10 years ago and today, my answers would be completely different.”
Image provided
