Erika DeFreitas: and that break is the one that shows (to shift, a curve, to quiver)

×

Expand

Erika DeFreitas, “The Black Madonnas of Perpetual Murmurs 1,” 2023

(courtesy of the artist and Christie Contemporary, Toronto)

Opening Reception: Friday 24 January, 6-9pm

In 2011, a team of researchers examined the teeth of a woman who lived in medieval Germany sometime during the years of 1000-1200 AD. The researchers found hundreds of tiny blue particles within her dental calculus, which they determined to be lapis lazuli, a metamorphic rock prized for its intense blue colour often used to tint medieval illuminated manuscripts. The researchers deduced that this woman must have been a scribe who repeatedly licked her pigment-soaked pen nib as she worked on illuminated manuscripts, an area of work previously thought to be dominated exclusively by men.[1]

This exchange of artist and material, body and mineral, sparked a realm of inquiry and exploration for artist Erika DeFreitas to search for absences within the canon of art history. The new and recent works in this solo exhibition commune with a constellation of women in a multi-part dialogue that transcends space and time. These women range from the medieval scribe with lapis lazuli embedded in her teeth, to the subject of an 1870 painting by French artist Frédéric Bazille, to the artist’s paternal grandmother, who was one of a community of women who tended to a statue of the Black Madonna of La Divina Pastora Church in Siparia, Trinidad. Spanning collage, video, performance, and photography, DeFreitas’ work excavates presence within absence, and manifests kinship and memory within gesture and process.

[1] Brigit Katz, “Blue Pigment in Medieval Woman’s Teeth Suggest She Was a Highly Skilled Artist.” Smithsonian Mag, January 10, 2019.