Niqui Toldi’s Unbeing exhibition at Junky Comics: girls and anxiety

Words: Saskia Edwards

Images: Jonathan Rae

In Niqui Toldi’s illustrations there’re lots of girls - short hair, long hair, smoking, angry, pierced, bound.

But really, all these girls are Niqui. They’re like a self-portrait - a manifestation of how she feels and is. And they’re a way of grappling with her own life and self-identity. 

She says: “it’s just sort of a way for me to deal with how I’m feeling internally because I’m not always good at externalising how I feel to other people.

“It’s sort of a way for me to separate myself from being too vulnerable at the same time. It’s being vulnerable but without being completely vulnerable.

“Because it’s not always necessarily completely obvious that they are almost me.”

The girls seem sad at times, self-destructive, lost, with hands anxiously clasping at the ground or onto a cigarette or a match or a scalpel. And they do really display anxiety quite well - where nothing bad is happening immediately but you’re trapped sitting there half naked smoking and feeling helpless with a whirlwind in your brain.

This ‘Unbeing’ series looks at the last year of Niqui’s life. 

“A lot of things happened - a relationship I had of four years had just ended, my grandmother who lives alone and I’m her only blood relative... had a stroke so I’m her main contact.

“Then I was getting more responsibilities at work and it was the first year I’d been medicated and properly diagnosed for my anxiety.

“So it was a huge collection of all these things happening in the one year.

“I just started to deal with it - started drawing it.”

But it’s not that easy. Putting on a solo exhibition was a big deal for Niqui. 

“Because of my anxious nature and shyness I’ve always been really reluctant and I almost hold myself back.

“So this is the first time that I’ve really let myself put myself out there.

“Even last night at the launch, it was exciting and I was nervous and people had started coming in.

“And maybe five people had come in that I didn’t know and I just started crying up the back, which is really ridiculous because this is a really good thing, this is a fun time.”

Of course it went really well. People sardined themselves into Junky Comics, admiring what I guess they thought were imaginary sirens. 

If you really think about it, Niqui’s works remind you of the true purpose of art. They show that out of anxiety, self-doubt and heart ache you can make something. And it can be beautiful.

'Imagine Being Attractive': Emily McGuire at Jugglers Art Space

Words: Saskia Edwards

Images: Jonathan Rae

‘I just want to be profound and gorgeous’.

Someone actually wrote that on Tumblr. 

And for anyone who’s sifted through the cacophony of Tumblrs - that effectively amount to photos of Cara Delevingne, shitty quality lo-fi webcam selfies and F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes - then this idea probably isn’t foreign.

Female fashion Tumblrs are the focus of Emily McGuire’s ‘Imagine Being Attractive’ exhibition at Juggler’s Art Space. It’s an extension of her Honours thesis, which basically found:

“On the one hand you feel empowered because you’re like, ‘I’m blogging, I can do whatever I want, pick whatever I want, post whatever I want, I can be anonymous, I can be not anonymous, I do whatever I want with my blog’.

“Even Tumblr says, you can literally quote ‘customise everything’.

“So it makes you feel like you’re really empowered.

“But the irony is that you’re blogging this really homogenous mainstream identity.

“Tumblr blogs try and appear smart funny and attractive, but the irony is that it’s often reposted or re-found images from various fashion magazines.

“So of course these archetypal weird fashion blogs are just going to repeat what’s in the media.”

It’s kind of a sad conclusion. That these blogs, that people spend countless hours manicuring to represent their individuality, often do the opposite. In fact, they’re just absorbed into an abyss of Tumblrs that can be reduced to: ‘hot chicks with emotional issues’. 

But it’s easy to be cynical about Tumblr. Of course it’s a site “populated by young people”. And who can’t say they didn’t listen to Nirvana, salivate over a copy of Vogue and look listlessly into the distance thinking, ‘no one understands my deep turmoil as a white skinny middle-class teenager’ (or some variation of this). It just wasn’t on a blog. Let’s just say there comes a point in life where you wrack your brain for your Myspace password hoping that you never get a high enough profile that someone writes an article about it. 

“Blogs like Tumblr are just a new way to find identity and in that search realise that it’s never found,” says Emily.

“So it’s the same with clothing, you get dressed every day and every day you’re trying to figure out what am I going to wear, who am I, what am I doing with fashion, or how am I going to express myself in clothing.

“And it’s a process that has no end. 

“My whole project parallels the way people use images on Tumblr to perform identity and the way fashion also constructs identity as a performance on the surface of the body.”

These ideas manifest themselves in two ways at Emily’s exhibition. Some of her works substitute archetypal images found on Tumblr for text. For example, the words ‘Bored Looking Girl in Designer Clothes’ or ‘An Oil Painting of Some Flowers’. The kind of crap that Tumblr is almost haemorrhaging. And secondly, Emily also used actual text found on Tumblr. 

“People have actually written that on Tumblr and posted it among all these fashion images on their blog.

“It’s like this weird self-deprecating irony.

“On one hand they’re affirming this beautiful identity and on the other hand they’re critiquing it at the same time.”

Why do people write these things or post the images that they do? Well apparently that’s a question for a PhD.

But if you think about it long enough, what happens on Tumblr kind of applies to us all. In a depressing and paradoxical way: in the search for individuality, we’re all being caught in a web of sameness. 

Michael Zavros: unaffected opulence

Words: Saskia Edwards 

Images: Jonathan Rae

Original artwork: Michael Zavros

The grey veins of the marble pulsate.

Like muscular nacre - blemished with blue.

Perpetual beauty.

The perfect form.

Michael Zavros’ affinity with horses is obvious. So often has his work captured the spectacular physicality of the creatures.

But that equestrian pomp is also filled with a kind of shy mystery unique to horses. It’s bravado that’s matched with a timidity. Like they never lose their wildness.

While horses are often sociable - it’s married with a reclusiveness. In fact, there seems to only be tenuous collective nouns for the species.

And in some ways I see a parallel with Michael Zavros and the animal that’s been at the centre of so many of his pieces. 

With many works saturated in luxury and pageantry, it’s hard to imagine Zavros as the humble, unaffected man that he is - even wearing the same beat-up pair of Crocs that I’ve seen and read about in so many spreads.

But in many ways he’s a calm, in fact introverted, person. Despite travelling to exotic and glamorous destinations, Zavros is content in his Chandler hermitage (for now).

“I’m not a very extroverted person in public that can seem quite the opposite to what you just suggested.

“I can seem very aloof or arrogant.

“It’s often said to me when people are interviewing me or I meet someone that I’m much nicer than they expected. So I’m kind of aware of the different ways you can be perceived.”

Zavros’ working space - a detached white warehouse saturated in natural light, with exposed blonde wood, and a view of the chickens - is a sanctum.

“I live very deliberately in a vacuum here in Brisbane and we have a bit of an island.

“I don’t get out much and... now that I’m home I realise that I don’t speak to people during the week - I’m just doing my own thing.

“And that can be very grounding - I very deliberately sit outside of the art world. I think my work can be a part of the art world, I don’t really have to.”

The walls and tables are lined with taxidermy, skulls and books - cheetahs and peacocks’ glass eyeballs follow you. It’s somewhere between Georgia O’Keeffe and Rembrandt’s studios while taking a stroll through Versailles. And, of course, you have the choice to recline on a Chesterfield sofa or Corbusier chaise lounge.

It’s like stepping back into Zavros’ curated exhibition for the Queensland Art Gallery.

“Instead of curating a show I sort of curated a character or a persona,” he says.

“It was very autobiographical - it shouldn’t be a surprise that you would feel like you’re in the same space.”

There’s a few differences: a sewing machine and patterns (evidence of his daughter’s foray into fashion design) and a kite, which belongs to his son Leo. Apparently they’re unfazed by their father’s success.

“That is just their everyday existence, this is how everyone lives, everyone’s dad is at home doing these things,” says Zavros.

“And every now and then they’ll observe that we do live differently to some of our friends or have a different take on life or they’re exposed to different things.”

Unlike most dads, Zavros was commissioned to paint Victoria Cross recipient Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith for the Australian War Memorial. It’s quite a departure from his paintings of Prada shoes, Rolls-Royces and floral arrangements. But it still retains Zavros’ aesthetic - laced with classicism and modernity.

“That’s one of those lovely things as an artist - you’re asked to respond to something that otherwise you wouldn’t.

“So you bring everything that interests you or that you’re about to subject matter that’s really not what you’re about at all.”

Depicting Australia’s most highly-decorated serviceman came with its challenges. It took Zavros almost three years to realise the work. 

Michael said in that time “Ben had just grown larger and larger in the nation’s consciousness and he’s just become such a hero for Australia. I think that that probably is another reason why I was very slow in finalising the work because I was changing direction more and becoming more and more aware of who he was and the pressure that was on me to create the right thing.”

Now, Zavros is turning to another endeavour - photography. He’s freshly home from LA where he shot with Sean O'Pry, who’s currently the world’s highest paid male model and also the star of Taylor Swift’s Blank Space video (already viewed half a billion times). 

“So he’s suddenly famous on a whole other level. But he was great, he got into working with an artist as opposed to a commercial client.

“So I’m showing that work in Hong Kong [next month].” 

With work that’s so imbued with beauty, in its subject and treatment, photography opens a new level of perfection. It’s the instantaneous nature of photography that appeals to Zavros. The fact that it immortalises an ephemeral moment. This is instead of painting, where bringing a vision into fruition can be very arduous.

“I still love painting and I will always paint. But there’s an immediacy I suppose to that kind of image.

“Especially when I’m mimicking the fashion world and various slick commercial aesthetics of I guess advertising.

“There’s kind of an immediacy there that I like. That photography affords. I’m enjoying photography more and more.”

Already, Zavros’ photographic work encompasses his signature ability to amalgamate classical beauty and modern excess.

It’s hard to explain what’s so captivating about Michael Zavros as a person and an artist. It’s a combination of being aware of his genius talent, but also his humanity.