Erika DeFreitas
Erika DeFreitas, Her body is full of light (often, very often, and in floods), 2016. 04:22 minutes single-channel video. Photo by Julia Gillard.
Visual description: The video work juxtaposes two recordings, side-by-side, of the adult artist and her mother against a black background. They sit front-facing the camera, head and upper body visible in the frame and wearing similar white t-shirts. Together they transition through fits of giggles, laughter, crying, and sobbing for the duration of the video.
Wall Text: In this single-channel video, Erika DeFreitas, a second-generation East Indian, negotiates her colonial Catholic heritage. In Guyana, the Catholic church grew with the arrival of Portuguese indentured laborers to work on the sugar plantations, replacing African slaves. While missionaries, such as the Ursuline and Jesuit orders, established schools that welcomed children from all backgrounds African, Chinese, European, Indian, and Indigenous. Her mother who grew up in Guyana is close to her Catholic faith, while DeFreitas who grew up in Canada is not. “The fleeting image of my mother and I laughing hysterically to the point of tears exists in my mind,” DeFreitas explains. The piece invokes Catholic traditions of lamentation and the phenomena of the weeping statues of the Virgin Mary paired with notions of intergenerational colonial trauma existing within the body.
About
Erika DeFreitas’ multidisciplinary practice includes performance, photography, video, installation, textiles, drawing and writing. Placing emphasis on gesture, process, the body, documentation and paranormal phenomena, DeFreitas mines concepts of loss, post-memory, legacy and objecthood. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including: Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery; Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts, Winnipeg; Gallery TPW, Toronto; Project Row Houses and the Museum of African American Culture, Houston; Fort Worth Contemporary Arts; and Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita. She is a recipient of the 2016 Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Finalist Artist Prize, the 2016 John Hartman Award, and was longlisted for the 2017 Sobey Art Award. DeFreitas holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.