In my nightmares - Jamila Toderas

HUW DAVIES GALLERY 22 July–8 August
 

 

Each year we select graduates from the Canberra Institute of Technology and the ANU School of Art for PhotoAccess emerging artist residencies. The intention is to assist those artists, mostly young and with limited exhibition experience, to develop and present new work in HUW DAVIES GALLERY exhibitions. The residency projects can involve mentoring, courses, access to facilities and equipment and, towards the end of each residency, exhibition opportunities in solo or group shows. The exhibitions are assisted by funding under the ACT component of the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy.

From the 2009 CIT graduating year we offered Jamila Toderas and Holly Treadway residencies and, unusually, both accepted. Holly’s exhibition 'sticks and stones' is showing alongside Jamila’s in the first emerging artists exhibition by CIT graduates for some years. We hope others will follow their lead. Jamila and Holly are showing new work made specifically for these exhibitions.

Jamila Toderas has an unusual, dark vision. Her graduating show work was a series of dramatic self portraits suggesting fear and alienation. The 'In my nightmares' work takes those emotions further, moving into areas most feared by young people and their parents alike: the fear of harm from madness, societal pressures, familiar seen (killer clowns?) and unseen demons, and self abuse. Toderas and her characters sleep in fear, wake in fear, lose themselves in fearful, alienating rooms and landscapes, and they bleed. Toderas’ work, as she says in her Artist Statement, ‘… shows the depths of darkness hidden in my eccentric soul’.

These are carefully staged images, continuing Toderas’ early interest in creating the subjects for her work including, in particular, costumed family pets. Bonnie is an early example. A close examination of the images in this exhibition, Lost and Circus bloodshed, for example, shows how far she has travelled from the days of dressing Bonnie as a cheerful clown. Her imagination and command of craft mark Jamila Toderas as a young artist of great promise.

PhotoAccess is proud to have helped bring Jamila Toderas’ work to a wider Canberra audience through a 2010 emerging artist residency and her 'In my nightmares' exhibition in the HUW DAVIES GALLERY at the Manuka Arts Centre.

David Chalker

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