Sonja Ahlers: Make Art Like Me

Deluge Contemporary Art

636 Yates St, Victoria | http://deluge.ca

Opening Friday, September 6 @ 7pm | Gallery Hours: Wed–Sat noon–5pm

Arising indirectly but inarguably from her seminal 2000 Rogue Art/Deluge exhibition Everything I Own Is In This Room (aka The Possibility of Overcoming Negative Thought) Victoria-based polymath Sonja Ahlers’ Make Art Like Me allows us entrée into a life/work that is multivalent, intertwined and recombinant, comprising words, images, objects and actions. These two process-based installations, separated by almost a quarter century, several incarnations, provinces (and one territory) act as shapeshifting bookends to Ahlers’ 2023 survey Classification Crisis. Make Art Like Me is an immersive environment in the Deluge space with the artist herself creating epilogues and forwards to her past and future works, independent of institutional oversight or curatorial interference.

Sonja Ahlers is a visual artist and poet based in Victoria, on the unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) speaking peoples, now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. Since the early 1990s, Ahlers has worked primarily in zines, book and book-adjacent formats, in a medium that she calls visual poetry. She is the author of Temper, Temper and Fatal Distraction (Insomniac Press, 1998 and 2004), The Selves (Drawn & Quarterly, 2010), Swan Song (Conundrum Press, 2021). She was a key contributor to Rookie from 2011 to 2015. In 2023, a major survey of her work, Classification Crisis, was co-published by Conundrum Press and the Richmond Art Gallery in conjunction with a 30-year retrospective. 

Make Art Like Me Hands-On Workshop

Sunday, September 22, 2–5pm @ Deluge (space is limited – preregistration required)