The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

The Selves

by Sonja Ahlers

Drawn & Quarterly

Like the Petits Livres series that Drawn & Quarterly put out, The Selves is another work owing more to art than to comics. But more than that it’s a return to the art of zine culture and scrap booking. Not the determinedly middle class modern scrap booking resurgance we saw a few years ago, but a very rough and ready scrap book culture owing a lot to a back to basics, DIY ethic.

There’s a narrative in The Selves, but it’s not a simple one, it’s all contained in the strong sense of connection, of making links through found objects; stickers, magazine photo collages, old greetings cards, throwaway lines taken out of context from songs, book covers and much more.

And throughout The Selves, Sonja Ahlers sets out a journey from childhood to adulthood through her own feminine, feminist filter, taking in all manner of visual imagery along the way, through Holly Hobbie and other images of childhood, to teenage dreams of romantic ideals delivered through glossy magazines and on to adulthood, a burgeoning sexuality and finding a position in the world.

And all the way through we return again and again to feminine iconography, and icons – Holly Hobby, Princess Diana, Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, Jamie Lee Curtis, the Olsen Twins, romance novels, kittens, babies – it’s all thrown at the page, yet on careful reading it all connects, evolves and nearly, but not quite coalesces into the “haunting, beautiful study of art, pop, femininty and feminism” the press release would have you believe.

It’s something that initially I reacted against, very much not my sort of thing. But as I explored each page, as I thought about what the artist meant, what she wanted to say, I found myself enjoying the experience. The repetition in the visual imagery, the use of scraps of modern cultural references to reinforce an artist’s viewpoint is strangely intriguing. It’s certainly a lot more satisfying than the Petits Livres at books I’ve looked at, as it definitely puts forward an artist’s unique attempt to document something very important to herself.

But despite that, I don’t think it really accomplishes enough, I don’t think it’s strong enough and I think Ahler’s message and her reasoning is lost in the very pretty but just too distracting and disconnected imagery she utilises.

It’s certainly not comics, it’s definitely someone putting their own unique artwork out there for an audience to take what they will from it. And although it’s not hugely successful, there’s definitely something there. But as with any art of this nature, the real proof is in each viewer’s experience. Yours may differ very much from mine.