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{"id":268759,"date":"2025-05-01T16:10:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-01T21:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/compte-rendu\/sonja-ahlers-make-art-like-me\/"},"modified":"2025-05-08T09:08:29","modified_gmt":"2025-05-08T14:08:29","slug":"sonja-ahlers-make-art-like-me","status":"publish","type":"compte-rendu","link":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/reviews\/sonja-ahlers-make-art-like-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Sonja Ahlers
Make Art Like Me<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
A carefully arranged chaos of shells, cassette tapes, collages, gemstones, ribbons, zines, and one framed decades-old heart-shaped ketchup chip: the exhibition Make Art Like Me <\/em>at Deluge Contemporary Art featured thirty years of girlish artefacts that comprise Sonja Ahlers\u2019s oeuvre. Despite its maximalism, the exhibition was an intimate display positioned as a compass for navigating a world of objects and images that conspires to perpetuate an absurd notion of woman-ness. Ahlers asserts that women are various and welcomes you into her universe of multitudes. Her practice is defined by a relentless form of autobiography through self-chronicling. She collects the ephemera of everyday life, including handwritten letters, magazine cut-outs, and spent lipstick tubes. This perennial impulse to preserve what is both infinite and quotidian was evidenced in the exhibitionmost vividly by a giant ball of aluminum foil placed lovingly on a plinth.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Overstuffed binders were set out in the centre of the gallery. Visitors found the excesses of Ahlers\u2019s personal archive by thumbing through their plastic-sheet-protected pages. As Ahlers once explained, \u201cThe archive is proof that I exist.\u201d This cyclical and reifying conversation between her and her audience gives her practice an ouroboros quality. Her selves are positioned within a complex matrix of girlhood, womanhood, sisterhood, and motherhood. While it\u2019s possible to read Ahlers, now fifty-four, as someone overly occupied with her youth, it is rather that her work is a meditation on the stages of selfhood, suggesting that they\u2019re always unfolding and refolding concurrently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Sonja$
Sonja Ahlers<\/strong>
Pink Vanity<\/em> (detail), installation view, Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria, 2024.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Sonja$
Sonja Ahlers<\/strong>
The Fridge<\/em>, installation view, Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria, 2024.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Resplendent with artefacts of girlishness, the exhibition featured Ahlers\u2019s oft-visited pink palette and femme signifiers such as bows, sparkly stickers, and satin pointe shoes. These bastions of feminine juvenalia were displayed alongside unsettling visuals, including The Exorcist <\/em>(2023), a monochrome image of Regan MacNeil hovering mid-air in her nightgown, and the vaguely grotesque Teen Rescue with Kangaroo<\/em> (2014), a scan from National Geographic<\/em> that features a young woman cradling a joey in a plastic bag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cut-up pictures of iconic women appeared on every wall: Princess Diana, Virginia Woolf, Barbara Streisand, Brigitte Bardot. A painting reproducing the cover of Lives of Girls and Women <\/em>by the disgraced Canadian feminist fiction writer Alice Munro hung high in the gallery. Looming over the exhibition, it seemed to say that the realities of girls and women are not sweetness and light\u200a\u2014\u200athat in fact there is a darkness and violence that brews within these socially assigned roles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Sonja$
Sonja Ahlers<\/strong>
Pointe Shoes<\/em>, 2007-24, installation view, Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria, 2024.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Make Art Like Me <\/em>marked a decade since Ahlers returned to Victoria to move into her childhood home and care for her ailing mother. Over time, she has revisited her own archive, which includes an as-yet-unopened cardboard box labelled \u201cTo Mother.\u201d The archive, itself live, will continue to accrue, shift, and wane. Having been moved in sections from Victoria, to Vancouver, to Whitehorse, Ahlers\u2019s archive, the lifeblood of her practice, has returned once again to Vancouver Island, marking just another point on the ouroboros\u2019s infinite body.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Deluge Contemporary Art,<\/strong> Victoria
September 6\u200a\u2013October 5, 2024<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":268751,"template":"","categories":[131],"numeros":[7491],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[1000],"artistes":[7437],"thematiques":[],"type_compte-rendu":[],"class_list":["post-268759","compte-rendu","type-compte-rendu","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-compte-rendu","numeros-114-abstractions-en","auteurs-shauna-jean-doherty-en","artistes-sonja-ahlers-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/compte-rendu\/268759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/compte-rendu"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/compte-rendu"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/268751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268759"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=268759"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=268759"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=268759"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=268759"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=268759"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=268759"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=268759"},{"taxonomy":"type_compte-rendu","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_compte-rendu?post=268759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}