One moody April morning, Sophia Ahamed met with Sad Mag writer Maddie Reddon at Gene Café on Main Street. Ahamed’s work has been featured in a variety of hip publications like Juxtapoz, Color Magazine, Semi-Permanent, Design is Kinky, and (of course, yours truly) Sad Mag. But this year her work has also been up blowing up all over Vancouver in many local galleries and art shows. You might already be familiar with some of them: Hot One Inch Action, Post Up, the Postcard Show VII, and the Primacy of Consciousness. With much more work set to delight-and-disturb Vancouver in the next coming months, Ahamed spared some her time to chat with us over coffee.

Sad Mag: Who are you?

Sophia Ahamed: [Laughs.] That’s a really scary question. I guess in terms of a career, I’m a graphic designer and a visual artist. As for who I am as a person, I’m still searching for that girl. We’ll see who I think I am, like maybe in the next couple years, when I become Zen.

SM:  [Laughs.] I’ve been looking up some of your work online and I’d like to talk about some of the pieces I saw of yours in the Postcard Show. Would you like to give me a little context and tell me a little about the show?

SA: It’s a really good show put on by a friend of mine, the curator Paulina Glass. She conducts a show with about forty to fifty contemporary artists, local and international, and what they do is they create original artwork that is printed on a postcard. Usually, it’s one night, or sometimes two or three night show, where you go in and you can meet some of the artists, buy these postcards, bid on them, the bidding starts at five bucks and it goes up in increments of five. It gives everybody a chance to have a good night and come home with some art that they can afford, that’s still an original piece of artwork. It’s a really beautiful concept.

SM: I thought it went really well with your work… I thought that the phantasmatic feel of some of your illustrations, their haunting quality, really fit for me with the medium of the postcard. The postcard is so ephemeral, something that’s so transitory, sometimes it doesn’t get to its destination, there’s missed communication… Could you speak a little more on how your work fits into that medium?

SA: Yeah, I mean kind of what you said! It really is something that makes you think, it hints to what it means to be alive… to send information back and forth to different countries, the postcard might get lost it. The person you’re sending it to might not be someone who you really like, it could be an ex or an ex-friend or something. It could be any one of those things. With my work, I always try to make people feel without trying to tell them what to feel. A lot of my anatomy stuff, a lot of the body work, comes from a certain place within myself that, when I put it out there, the people who look at it pick up different messages. Usually it’s a personal one.  When they look at it ‘oh this reminds me of this time of my life when blah-blah happened,’ or it reminds them of a person, or it gives them a feeling or an emotion. It’s weird because it connects you, even though the stories are different, it connects you on an emotional level. I’ve felt these emotions too. It may not be the same people or the same situations but I think that is kind of what brings you closer to your audience, “Oh I understand what this artist was feeling maybe, I kind of feel that too, even though if that’s not it exactly.” They have no idea whether it’s true or not but it kind of brings you together on a… I want to say psychic… but maybe on a mental level, which I think is very important.

SM: So even if the level that you two are on is incommensurate, it’s still nice to have a connection.

SA: Yes, I think that is true of humans, of our species anyways. We’re all connected emotionally. It doesn’t matter what your background is. I think that if we all sat down and talked about relationships, something like a common subject, all our emotions, even our experiences would be different, and the outcome different, but the emotional baggage that comes with it, happy or sad, connects us all. I think that is what really connects us as human beings.

SM: Our emotional baggage connects us! I like that… I’ve seen some of the pieces from your most recent gallery, “Milk – an abstract exploration of anatomy,” would you mind describing some of the work from this exhibit?

SA: It was a collection of all the anatomy work I’ve done and some new things. I tried to create that emotional connection by exposing the body, not by going through surrealism and nudity, which is a way that a lot of people express vulnerability. I tried to go beneath the surface and say, we all have our bodies and we all look a certain way but if you tear back the skin, and look underneath, you can see that there’s a lot of similarities. In fact, if everyone was inside out, there wouldn’t be a lot of gender and racial issues because we’d all be the same.

SM: But, also, the things that make us the same are kind of terrifying.

SA: Yeah, exactly. You start to see yourself more as an entity, more of an energy, rather than as someone who is in a body. So what I did with the show is I tried to go on a micro level. I started with a few pieces of the brain like cells, the abstract cellular, what’s going on in the inner body… Towards portraits and portraits of the body, looking at the anatomy within all that. I tried to show a process. But, at the same time, with the milk thing, I did it in an abstract way so that people don’t have to feel so committed to knowing exactly what each anatomy piece means. It’s not a biology class. You know what I mean? [Laughs.] You can kind of look at it and enjoy it and take whatever you want from it and kind of create your own ideas, emotions and feeling from it, without having to first say that this is the heart, this is the aorta…

SM: You don’t get caught up in classifications.

SA: You just get caught up in what it means to you and so that’s what I tried to do with the show.

SM: Why Milk?

SA: Because milk flows… It’s something that all of us grow up on, “drink milk, it’s good for your body.” And it is! I think that’s why I chose it because it’s free flowing… It flows through you. When I think about milk, I see white, I think about bones. I think about strong bones and I see it as a liquid, flowing throughout your body. It engulfs you, it strengthens each little part… So that’s what I thought about. I thought about having that kind of abstractness, how it strengthens the individual, again maybe not on a physical level, but on an emotional, mental, spiritual level.

SM: I’ve noticed that in several of your exhibits that you have a statement you use repeatedly that talks about the healing capacity of art. How do you see art as producing a healing? What kind of healing processes does your work seek to engage? Is it general? Do you have very specific ideas about healing?

SA: I like to leave that process open. I feel like it does. I think all art provides a healing process.

SM: But from what? The ills of society? From mental anguish?

SA: The mental and emotional. As kids we hear take care of your body and go to the gym and, that’s really important and all that, but there’s also the mental, emotional, spiritual health that people don’t touch on. It’s kind of looked as “oh whatever, just get over it,” you know when someone asks how you are doing you say good even though you feel like shit… What I mean is, art is an emotional healing process. When you stand there, look at the art, then you read the artist’s statement… Sometimes there’s this connection. That can happen with anybody’s work, anywhere. I really feel that. That makes sense to me.

SM: So sometimes art’s ability to identify a problem is what is healing.

SA: I think so. It’s one of those things. As an artist, you can paint your feelings. It’s kind of cliché… But as an artist you can paint your feelings, you can write or do poetry whatever, act out your feelings in this kind of contained way and you can share that with other people and I think that’s very powerful. Especially in today’s world when things are just getting more and more hectic. I leave it up to the person, you now, whichever way it brings them clarity, with whatever they are going through, even if it’s just run of the mill, like “I’m stressed out I need some sleep sort of thing,” it’s completely up to them. I’m just trying to invite them to be open.

SM: What’s coming up for you?

SA: A couple shows going on. A show with Jose Rivas at Hot Art/Wet City. It’s called Two Faced and it should be going up in August. I have a secondary solo show coming up at Kafka’s on Main for the Fall. So both shows will have new work. And Textbook Magazine, which launched April 24 at GWorks.

ATTENTION:

On August 17th, the People’s Co-Op Bookstore will be hosting “2 Cities / 5 Poets,” a reading and a meeting between the twin cities, Vancouver and Seattle, whose ongoing flirtation continues to inspire writers and artists alike. This event features Jen Currin, Don Mee Choi, Melanie Noel, Rachel Rose, Renée Saklikar and Raoul Fernandes, from both cities and from all over.

CONCERNING THE AFOREMENTIONED:

Across time and space (i.e. the last two weeks), I spoke with the event organizer, local poet and writing professor, Jen Currin, about the literary community shared between Seattle and Vancouver. A woman of threes, Jen teaches at three institutions—Vancouver Community College, SFU and Kwantlen—and has authored three books of poetry: The Sleep of Four Cities, Hagiography, and The Inquisition Yours.

We confabulated with the lovely Renée Saklikar, another resident poet of Vancouver, whose upcoming publication from Nightwood Editions, children of air india, is a series of elegies taking up the bombing of Air India Flight 182. The book is part of Renée’s larger work, the life-long poem-chronicle thecanadaproject.

I asked Jen and Renée to ponder the links between people, language, cities, and countries by way of the ephemeral “thing” separating and bridging all of them: borders.

Sad Mag: Where are you originally from?
Jen Currin: Portland, Oregon.

Renée Saklikar: Well, that depends. New-West-Min-Is-Ter (pronunciation, circa 1977) is my British Columbia home-town. I arrived here via Saskatchewan and before that, from Quebec, Northern Ontario, Nova Scotia, New foundland and Labrador, and before that Poona / Pune, India where I was born.

SM: What do you experience when crossing the border?
JC: Annoyance. Depression at the “security” era in which we live.  It’s gotten worse and worse since 9/11. Iris scans and fingerprinting for “non-citizens” of the U.S. and Canada. Depressing and ridiculous.

SM: When I say “border” what is the first image that comes to your mind?
RS: Day into night. Grief into joy. Inclusion/Exclusion. Every movie ever made about the immigrant/exile experience, including, El Norte, Casablanca, Children of Men. Also, the Sound of Music.

SM: What’s your relationship to Seattle?
JC: It’s a city I know as a not-quite tourist; I visit my good friends there usually once or twice a year, and go down also to do poetry readings sometimes. Once a year I usually go to get a hug from the holy woman Amma when she does her U.S. tour. I love the coffee, the bookstores, and the green green green.

RS: Seattle is get-away and return. It is permission, for some strange reason required, to go micro-local. It is the Queen Ann district and almost every restaurant and shop in those two city blocks surrounding the faded glory of the Seattle Centre. Favourites include: Toulouse Petit for breakfast, and afternoons spent in the small second hand book store on Mercer. Home away from home in Seattle is the Inn at Queen Ann. [..] In this way, place is a comfy-known, all the edges of the city smoothed over.

SM: How does your particular space inflect your work?
RS: Particularity occurs as dimension:  what is seen, not seen; what is at the margins, not the centre; what is un/spoken. What is slant, not straight on. What is un/authorized, un/official. Bargain room. Off-off Broadway. On the bus. Standing in a long queue, waiting.

SM: What has been a significant crossroad for you as a poet?
JC: It was important for me to cross borders—to move up here from the States. Soon after moving here in 2002, three poets and I started a women’s poetry collective; it grew to a collective of seven poets called vertigo west. We worked together for many years, workshopping, giving readings, publishing chapbooks. Two of us were from the U.S., one of us was from Turkey, three were from Ontario, one was from Quebec. I can’t imagine a better “poetic landing” than the one I received. Thank you Brook, Kim, Meliz, Colette, Emilie, and Helen.

SM: What kinds of borders do you cross within your own work?
RS: To cross might be to transgress: memorial undercut by counter / memorial. Official confronted with un/authorized. Subtext underscoring surface, context framing transition, from one kind of narrative to another, the journey as if to a different country. From present to the far past, which is entry into another dimension. From community remembrance as collective: staid, settled— to witness as transaction, ever-changing, present.

SM: For you, what do these cross border encounters do for the literary community?
JC: These borders were made up by colonizers and it’s hard to think of them as anything but arbitrary. That said, they are also very real and these nation-states determine so much of our lives. I am more interested in the Poetry Nation than the nation-state. Cross-border encounters strengthen the Poetry Nation. Poets need each other. We understand that what we do is important, even as late capitalism could give a fuck about us. Good. Let’s remain underground and quietly build our global network. Vancouver [poet] Rachel Rose runs an occasional cross-border reading series called “Cross Pollination,” and I love the idea of poets as bees pollinating the flowers of another region. Sharings of aesthetics, politics, forms…

SM: What happens when poets cross borders?
RS: Present time irradiated by border time. Mix n Match. Cross-stitch. Do-over. Hop-skip. Re-discover.