Sonja Ahlers | Classification Crisis

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Sonja Ahlers, "Shapes," 2022

mixed media, 11” x 17”. Courtesy of the Artist.

Opening Reception: September 9th, 2 - 5 PM, with Artist and Curator

For thirty years, Victoria-based artist Sonja Ahlers has been making books in her distinct visual idiom that is equal parts collage and poetry. Classification Crisis, a major survey of her career, emerged from Ahlers’s project of the last half-decade to prepare her archive. The exhibition includes her Riot Grrrl zines of the nineties, one-of-a-kind chapbooks spanning thirty years, a decade of unseen work after she “quit art” in the wake of the Vancouver art boom, and other artworks and ephemera from a career of collecting images and scraps of language.

Revisiting her career also led Ahlers to produce a new bookwork, Rabbit-Hole, which she describes as a “feminist memoir/scrapbook/confessional commentary on the art world and my place within it.” Adapted for the exhibition as an installation, Rabbit-Hole re-tells the story of her career as a mystery narrative. From the hindsight of the #MeToo reckoning, Ahlers thematizes the collecting and reassembling that sustains her art as a search for clues left behind by her former selves.

Best known for her books Temper, Temper (1998)—a compilation of her nineties zines—The Selves (2010)—the precursor to her influential work with Rookie Mag—and the handmade angora Fierce Bunnies she has been making for three decades, Ahlers’s work has been a touchstone for multiple generations of feminist culture. The exhibition is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated publication that includes essays by contemporaries of Ahlers from throughout her career, and Rabbit-Hole.