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.