A ‘personal archive…for institutional deposit’

Classification Crisis (exhibition catalogue)
Rabbit-Hole (book publication)
by Sonja Ahlers
edited by Godfre Leung

Wolfville, NS: Conundrum Press (co-publication with Richmond Art Gallery), 2023
$50.00  /  9781926594347

Reviewed by Christina Johnson-Dean

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Double-take! For someone unfamiliar with the work of Sonja Ahlers (born 1971), this reaction is probably inevitable. As you look further into her creations, which over thirty years have often defied categorization, there will be many moments of looking again, pondering, turning a page around, standing in a different location, and just thinking about loaded images and words as well as your own perspective and the relentless passing of time. On the cover of the Richmond Art Gallery and Conundrum Press publications for her exhibition Classification Crisis and newest book Rabbit-Hole is a digital collage of Princess Diana peering at you with one eye from behind a …. squirrel? No wait a moment …. a rabbit and mysterious arms holding it and obscuring the ears? On the back cover, the Princess’s eye has been covered. Before dismissing pretty princesses and bunnies, I needed to look further and so should you.

Growing up, Ahlers lived with her mother in a house on Wollaston Street in Victoria and from her early years created collages and poetry of what was important to her as a solitary artist working with what was on hand in her home – office supplies of 8 1/2” x 11” paper, scissors, glue, markers, and a myriad of magazine cuttings. A constant theme – the bunnies – was due to an early trauma as a 3 1⁄2 or 4 year old – witnessing her mother cry and seeing the bloody aftermath of the neighbours’ dogs pulling their rabbits from the hutch and massacring them. Later she coped by taking a pink angora sweater and crafting a “fierce bunny,” which would be followed by other bunny creations and imagery until the present, when the bunny seems more at peace.

Typical of young females, she loved teen magazines (including Sassy), fashions, and music as she navigated finding her way in the world, facing the perennial questions of dealing with a confusing and unjust world as well as finding her interests, capabilities, and most importantly community. Victoria was a city noted for its conservatism and was not a vibrant cultural hub, as the 1996 song “Tiny Town” by Ahlers’ band Kiki Bridges described. Important was her bedroom, where she created black and white, photocopied, half-size zines – 4.25” x 5.5” booklets made from office papers, folded and stapled in the middle, which became the key to connecting her to the outside world that held meaning for her. The zines were exchanged mostly in the mail through a network of artists, writers, musicians and scenesters, accessed through the subculture of do-it- yourself (DIY) punk rock. In the 1990s Ahlers’s pen pals were massive and she remembers, “I lived through my P.O. Box.” Her longtime friend Kathleen Hanna recalled in her piece for the exhibition (“If You Don’t Like My Driving, Get Off the Sidewalk”) that zines like Ahlers’ were a respite from the negativity of the male-dominated punk scene where Hanna played in a feminist punk band in the nineties. That was when Riot Grrrl, a feminist punk movement was created. Hanna loved receiving Ahlers’s zines and later books, reminding her how humour and pleasure were important.

Though she studied at a community college (anthropology) for about a year in Victoria, her path has not been academic. Rather she is self-trained and excels at showing her love of pop culture. Ahlers became familiar with comic art when living in Montreal in the early 1990s. Her first mass-marketed book Temper, Temper (Insomniacs Press) came out in 1998, showing her combination of visuals and text.

By 2000, she had her first solo show – Everything I Own Is in This Room – at the Rogue Gallery in Victoria – collages, sculpture, along with furniture from her bedroom, and the zine Happy Ball. As with many artists, making a commercial success was difficult, and she cleaned offices at night to support herself.

By 2001, Ahlers had moved to Vancouver, where she became intensely involved with creating and marketing her artistic creations in the very competitive environment of the province’s main commercial city and centre for more arts-educated artists in what was dubbed the “Second Vancouver School.” Ahlers worked jobs such as cleaning sets for horror movies to cover her finances, while using “outsider” spaces to keep her arts career alive. Her work was seen at the clothing boutique Eugene Choo, the community-based arts and crafts Blim Gallery, and the skate shop Antisocial. In 2002 Ahlers was featured with a solo exhibition Passing Fancies at the Helen Pitt Gallery and in 2003 she had an exhibit at the Or Gallery.

At this time Ahlers befriended Doretta Lau, who described the times in her “Rock the Boat” essay for Ahlers’ 2023 exhibition and publication. Lau remembered becoming aware of Ahlers at Pulpfiction Books on Main Street, across from the skate shop Antisocial, where her 2004 book of black and white list poems, Fatal Distractions (Insomniac Press), was launched. Ahlers’ lines, “I know I survived the hard times by being obsessed” and “The boat I missed was the one I was going to rock” are memorable. One feature was a corner with a pile of crumpled paper from book-making. She took a one-year course at Vancouver Community College’s Digital and Graphic Design programme, which certainly eased and enhanced her skills – another tool in her home office. In 2005, Ahlers joined Sarah Cain and Ginger Brooks Takahasi in a group show, “Book of Small” at the Open Space Gallery in Victoria and talked about seeing the art world lean to elitism, with “the wealthy indulging in art making and selling to the super rich.”

By 2007, Ahlers was burned out, so she dropped out of Vancouver’s “relentless pursuit of visibility, omnipresent gauntlet of gatekeepers, and obligations of running an art career” and moved to Whitehorse, Yukon. It was a self-care move, and she worked as a page at the Yukon Archives, which probably helped her understand her own collecting instincts. In the essay “A lightly fictionalized email exchange between Sonja Ahlers and Lisa Prentice, 2008-2010,” Prentice wrote of the healing process, a “meditation on her interior state….an extension of her art practice which privileges feeling states over exposition”. Ahlers’s studio was her kitchen and the interiority imposed by climate and landscape meant less pressure to be social or extroverted.

Ahlers’ first full colour book The Selves was published in 2010 by Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal, garnering her a spot on the longlist for the Sobey Art Award in 2011. In her essay “Cut It Up With Glee”, Tavi Gevinson, who had been introduced to Ahlers’s work when she was 14 years old and coming to realize the bearing that sexism and misogyny had on her life, was impressed with Ahlers, especially The Selves because it opened her eyes to the bonds between females – “tenderness, friendship, motherhood as well as resentment, exhaustion and bewilderment”. She connected with Ahlers as she was starting Rookie magazine for teenage girls in New York and hired her to craft its visual identify. Ahlers worked from an office building in Manhattan, helping to shape Rookie’s voice, especially with the four yearbooks, an annual compendium of work. The publication lasted seven years (2011-2018).

While working for Rookie she produced “Stairway to Heavy” in 2012, which she credits with her entry back into fine art. The staircase was gifted to her from a friend’s class and with her usual juxtaposition of ideas and shapes, she created something worthy of being in included in the “Sleep of Reason” exhibition curated by Jennifer Cane for the Yukon Arts Centre. Likewise, Ahlers turned a cache of discarded ballet slippers into a thought-provoking installation for “Larger Than Life Contemporary Art” curated by Ola Wlusek for the Ottawa Art Gallery in 2013.

In 2014, Ahlers returned to Victoria to care for her mother, who was ill. After her mother passed away, she decided to stay in the family home and became the caretaker of her affairs and the job of sorting through her mother’s vast collections. It was an enormous undertaking, not just in logistics but more importantly emotionally, as she tried to “make sense of this pile of stuff.” In their contribution “Sonja Ahlers and the Care Work in the Archive” to Classification Crisis, Alexandra Alisauskas and Jennifer Douglas write of the increasing importance of personal archives (as contrasted with “official” records, usually government, business, etc.) for understanding as well as instruments of care. Ahlers’ collection, which stretches back to her early youth, not only gives insights to her as an individual but to our modern culture, especially for youth and “outsiders,” females and feminists, popular and underground. She worked with freelance archivist Alisauskas and archival theorist Douglas in 2019 as she tackled the immense job of organizing her personal archive to prepare it for institutional deposit. They recognized her work reorients “from the traditional function as the object of care to serve as an instrument of care work, as not only a recipient but also a provider of care.” With her belongings and work in one place, Ahlers started to reorganize her creations, using binders and banking boxes.

Out of her sorting and organizing, she produced Swan Song (Conundrum Press) in 2021. She returned to fan culture through the lens of her mother’s Beatlemania, though she explained that it was a goodbye to her former selves, indicating that she had no interest in fandom or “imbalanced power dynamics of any kind… [realizing] it was a book about abusive relationships, including my relationship to the art world….” Though she has freely shown her many opinions, perspectives, intimate emotions, and her many varying supportive friends, her partners and family (except the occasional mention of her mother) remain private and mysterious.

In 2023, Classification Crisis and Rabbit-Hole reflect her extensive creative efforts over thirty years and she described her preparation of the archives as an unburdening. Her life’s work to date is expected to leave her hands, but it’s difficult to think that this “feminist memoir/scrapbook/confessional commentary on the art world and my place within it” will be the last of Sonja Ahlers. Like her bunnies, her art could pop up anywhere, taking any number of forms – words, colours, dimensions, books, containers. Look out as you look in to her constantly creative process!

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Christina Johnson-Dean graduated from the University of California, Berkeley (B.A. in History with Art minor) and then trained as a teacher.  After three years teaching in public schools, she took her retirement money and traveled around the world, teaching in Thailand and New Zealand, before settling in Victoria.  She completed a M.A. in History in Art and served as a teaching assistant as well as creating local art history courses for Continuing Education.  Since 1987, she has been teaching in the Greater Victoria School District.  Her publications include The Crease Family:  A Record of Settlement and Service in British Columbia (1981), “B.C. Women Artists 1885-1920” in British Columbia Women Artists (Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 1985) and three titles for Mother Tongue Publishing’s Unheralded Artists of B.C. series:  The Life and Art of Ina D.D. Uhthoff (2012), The Life and Art of Edythe Hembroff-Schleicher (2013), and The Life and Art of Mary Filer (2016).  In addition, she contributed to Love of the Salish Sea Islands with an article about Gambier Island (2019). [Editor’s Note: Christina Johnson-Dean has recently reviewed the work of Gary Sim, Robert Amos, and Kathryn Bridge.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, Maria Tippett, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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