Jamie Luoto & Tonia Nneji: When Dusk Falls

Cat-like a naked woman dips her head to lap at a pool of milk while in a different shadowy world, another woman stands, barely visible in the gloom, a blazing red belt of fabric tied around her waist. When Dusk Falls, a duo exhibition of paintings by Jamie Luoto and Tonia Nneji at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin, explores the complex psychological impacts of trauma in relationship to the female body and the potential of art as a powerful form of revelation and resistance. 

 

Jamie Luoto’s paintings form part of an ongoing investigation into her own experience of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Drawing on the occult and horror genre, she uses a symbolic visual language to make visible unseen symptoms of sexual abuse such as flashbacks, nightmares, dissociation, and intrusive thoughts. While Luoto typically works with self-portraiture, for this exhibition she has also created a series of smaller, still lifes that explore the ways in which our internal experience can bleed into and alter our perception of the world around us. For instance, in Are You Good Men and True? a white porcelain cat becomes both a surrogate for the female figure, pushed into a corner, and a figure of authority, passing judgment on the ‘men’, who are alluded to through condoms, a recurring motif in Luoto’s work. The same imagery is repeated in The Douter where the cat – now real – appears possessed, its eyes reflecting the outline of condoms, or ‘ghosts’, as Luoto calls them, and again in At the Event Horizon where a female figure adopts cat-like behaviour to lick at a pool of liquid in which condoms appear rising up from the surface.  

 

 

Nigerian artist Tonia Nneji similarly uses symbolism to confront a culture of suppression and violence against women, particularly in relation to the influence of religion. In 2014 she was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome but rather than being offered medical assistance, she was encouraged by family members to attend church programs. ‘It was their understanding of life and I never faulted them for it,’ she says, ‘but sadly in Nigeria and most of west Africa religion comes before medicine.’ As a result, Nneji, as well as many other women, ended up feeling powerless over her own body, a feeling which is reflected in the dark, cavernous backgrounds in which her figures appear. 

 

At the same time, her figures command and reclaim these spaces. They are clothed in bright, patterned fabrics and gaze directly at the viewer. In one work, a woman sits at the top of a corridor of intricate arches that evokes the imposing grandeur of church architecture. Her pose is one of defiance and indifference – she is barefoot, her dress falling off her shoulders and down between her open legs. Elsewhere, resistance is more subtly conveyed. For instance, in another painting set in a similar type of space, a figure stands wearing a dress that is emblazoned with logos depicting the (male) reverend and various saints. ‘We live in a society where people who pledge allegiance to a thing always want to show off that they belong to that group,’ says Nneji. ‘It’s common to go to a particular church  and see people wearing customised prints made by that church.’ In Nneji’s work, this kind of fabric becomes a symbol of ownership and entrapment rather than belonging, but it is one that her figures rebel against through their own embellishments such as a flash of red fabric tied around the waist or clasped in a hand.

 

Importantly, in the work of both artists, the female body itself is also a site not just of violence but of resistance. They empower the female body by making visible the unseen and the repressed, by sharing their trauma and vulnerability but by also confronting the viewer and eliciting discomfort. These are paintings that challenge us to not look away.