Sonja Ahlers

A visual illustration of time, process and what no longer works.

by

In 2002, while I was thumbing through the bookshelf of the man I would marry, he mentioned that when he moved to Vancouver in 1999 the apartment he had found near the beach was empty except for a copy of Sonja Ahlers’ 1998 genre-bending graphic novel, Temper, Temper, left propped against a window. 

I grew up in Ahlers’ hometown, Victoria. Just a little younger than her, I was a teenage fangirl, fascinated with her tender aesthetic and all those bunnies. Temper, Temper is with us to this day, more mine than his, and bears the markings of time. A previous owner excised the cover’s title and harvested precious images from its pages, a curious echo of Ahlers’ practice of collecting images and bits of text for collages.

Ahlers’ exhibition, Classification Crisis, on view until Nov. 5 at the Richmond Art Gallery in B.C.’s Lower Mainland, brings together many of these source materials, as well as her finished work. A major three-decade survey, it originated in her singular project of the last five years: creating an archive of her images and text-based works. 

Curated by Godfre Leung, the show’s presentation is richly beautiful. There are groups of wall-mounted works and tableaus of special items under museum glass, as well as framed paintings, collages and multiple binders of images, gathered for books both made and yet to be made. A major installation, The Archive, which spans the years since 2014, recreates how she organizes her work at home.

The exhibition illustrates Ahlers’ nostalgic revisitation of her process-driven art, while also seeming to mark a less-than-gentle farewell to the past. This juxtaposition is well represented in the displays for three of her books – Fatal Distraction, Swan Song and her most recent, Rabbit-Hole, billed as a “feminist memoir / scrapbook / confessional commentary.”

The Rabbit-Hole installation includes archival images, mixed-media collages, drawings and paintings. Enlarged and repeated images of our lady of perpetual sorrow, Princess Di, mingle with weeping line-drawn bunnies. Glossy pinks, citrus tones and cool blues amplify the images. It is a biography filled with Ahlers’ brand of salty whimsy.

Near Rabbit-Hole’s series of salon walls are four binders encompassing the long gestation of 2021’s Swan Song, with its cut-and-paste photocopier aesthetic. In the didactics, Ahlers says the binders are her solution to the frustration that came from feeling she had no platform – not wanting to be a zine artist or to call her books zines – and using binders for lack of a better organizational system. She calls Rabbit-Hole a “goodbye” to old lovers, different versions of herself, power dynamics and “the art world … whatever that is.” 

As if to drive home this point, amassed behind Swan Song’s four plinthed binders are piles of “leftovers” titled after her 2004 book, Fatal Distraction. Originally shown that year as a sculptural installation at a Vancouver shop, Antisocial Skateboard, this restaging uses pages from Rabbit-Hole for a two-foot-tall pile of crumped discards, ready for the garbage bin. It’s a visual illustration of time, process and what no longer works. 

Classification Crisis reflects how much of herself Ahlers has invested in her collections. Everything matters, every thing matters. This is clear in the meticulous installation of each piece, especially in the care given to her precious Fierce Bunnies, handsewn from reclaimed wool sweaters, and the singular copy of 2004’s Dada-esque Fur Book, which both have pride of place under glass. While there is a tedious quality to the copious binders and overflowing imagery, they nonetheless speak to Ahlers’ process, the skill of her handiwork and what has changed during her long career. ■

Sonja Ahlers, Classification Crisis, at the Richmond Art Gallery from Sept. 9 to Nov. 5, 2023. Curated by Godfre Leung.

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