GROWING PAINS

Sonja Ahlers

ARTBOOK MULTIPLE edition

Sometimes the line between lived experience and consumed media is blurry.

Ahlers’ images and text are often snatched from podcasts, song lyrics, magazines and the internet. Her work has been described as a feminist memoir/scrapbook/confessional commentary/diary and often takes the form of artbooks. Ahlers invents pathways between appropriated cultural elements, using them to create pages of collaged image and text that now reveal themselves as personal narratives. She favours ‘art’ supplies from the stationary store. The handmade, roughly cut and pasted physicality of these works removes them from their slick media and internet sources building a diary-like sincerity.

As I read the title of the book ‘Growing Pains’, look at a fragment of pasted text “no I have not seen her” said Lamb, or encounter the silhouette of a woman skating I understand these as appropriated and although I am not always sure of their cultural referent, they have an uneasy familiarity. They carry their history with a vague sense of collective memory yet are so severely fragmented and displaced that their link to that history is tenuous at best.

Ahlers collects words and images. Much like thrift store shopping for clothes that will later be taken apart and reconstructed, Ahlers amasses cultural ephemera in the form of words and images and then recycles them. She searches for phrases and images that she can repurpose, using strategies of fragmentation and juxtaposition.

Her vast archive is stored in her office, at the end of the bed, and throughout the house—in files, binders and banker’s boxes. Its flotsam and jetsam are periodically taken out and obsessively rewritten, typed and retyped in different fonts and sizes, then returned to the files, binders, and archive from which they came. Images and text are also rearranged in relation to one another as Ahlers intuitively and deliberately searches for the narrative she wants to find. Collaged in different ways, they form new partnerships and pairings. Through this recycling process, a loose, disintegrated narrative emerges and sometimes takes form in an artbook. As if trying to eke meaning from these decontextualized, now meaningless scraps, Ahlers brings them back to life, resuscitating them to build a personal narrative and, in the process, conjuring an authentic subject.

Expressing personal anxieties, fears, and beliefs, each page combines images and text from different sources explaining something to us about how Ahlers believes the world operates. Some of the pages point to toxic relationships while others to life lessons, often exposing how mass media constructs gender norms and erases women’s agency. Ahlers creates a personal narrative from appropriated media in a world where it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell where reality ends and virtual life begins.

Lynda Gammon

Also see A4 edition of Growing Pains by Sonja Ahlers

Sonja Ahlers is a visual artist and writer from the unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) speaking peoples, now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations (Victoria, BC, Canada). Her books are challenging to classify and can be found in several different sections of the library. 1994’s A Wandering Eye was the first of many self-published books that circulated mainly through the underground “penpal” network of DIY punk rock and Riot Grrrl zines. Ahlers attracted national attention with Temper, Temper, published by Insomniac Press in 1998, followed by Fatal Distraction in 2004. In 2010, Drawn & Quarterly published The Selves, and in 2021, Conundrum Press published Swan Song. Ahlers’ art has been exhibited across Canada, as well as in the United States, Japan, and Australia. She helped create the visual identity of Rookie Mag and from 2011 to 2015 and was a frequent contributor to the influential online publication, as well as lead artist/designer of its four print anthologies.