Artist Talk - ERIKA DEFREITAS: LIKE A CONJURING

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Erika DeFreitas, "like a conjuring," 2017

OPENING RECEPTION | Friday 13 April, 7:00 PM

ARTIST TALK | Saturday 14 April, 1:00 PM

PLATFORM centre is pleased to announce like a conjuring, a solo exhibition featuring the work of Erika DeFreitas (ON). 

Erika DeFreitas’ like a conjuring is a series of works that considers the relationships that we hold with our history and the authenticity within these narratives. The work was produced during a 2017 production residency at Mississauga Ontario’s historic Bradley House. This saltbox style farmhouse was built in 1830 by the Bradley family—early Loyalist settlers originally from Savannah Georgia. The house was formerly located on the shores of Lake Ontario until 1967 when the house was moved 3km inland. Here the artist explored the site to interrupt and challenge Canadian heritage narratives by using artifacts, photographs, and video to conceptually connect the water of the nearby lake, the history of the land, and the house together.

"When making these works, the Bradley House functioned as a site for starting the discussion and thinking process of conceptually moving water. I found out late in the process about the Bradley family owning an indigo planation in the South. The idea of water and movement then also became about colonialism - linking the notion of water as an enabler of colonization. In context the work is about 'historical spaces' — the staging of these places — what gets included and omitted in the retelling of history. The water, textiles, and indigo make reference to labour (domestic and slave), displacement, and migration."

ABOUT THE ARTISTErika DeFreitas is a Scarborough-based multidisciplinary conceptual artist. Placing an emphasis on process, gesture and documentation, her work explores the influence of language, loss and culture on the formation of identity, with the use of textile-based works, and performative actions, which are photographed. Her work has been exhibited in venues such as Project Row Houses (Houston), Gallery 44 (Toronto), Angell Gallery (Toronto), Pollock Gallery (Dallas), The Art Gallery of Mississauga, and the Art Gallery of York University (Toronto). Long listed for the 2017 Sobey Art Award, a recipient of the Toronto Friends of Visual Arts’ 2016 Finalist Artist Prize and the 2016 John Hartman Award, DeFreitas holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.