Erika DeFreitas This Unfathomable Weight, Movement Three: The Miraculous
Tkáron:to-based artist Erika DeFreitas engages with ritual and the divine feminine in the concluding program of This Unfathomable Weight, a three-part exhibition across the UTM campus and billboards in Mississauga that grapples publicly with making sense of living through recent crises. Through an understanding of trauma as a rupture in meaning-making, the project carves out space for reparative gestures across personal, societal, and spiritual registers.
Whether secular or spiritual, personal or communal, simple or elaborate, rituals are powerful stabilizing structures for contending with uncertainty. Acts of intentional repetition can have a deep psychological calming effect, and ceremonial gestures can saturate moments of transition with significance. These symbolic practices do not magically reorder the world; rather, they provide an internal sense of comfort and order that helps one cope with what has become disorderly.
Much of DeFreitas’ practice addresses themes of loss, grief, and communion with feminine energies beyond the realm of the ordinary. The five tableaus collectively titled to be sought, rounded, and full of grace (2023) draw a connective thread through the many ways the artist has engaged with representations of the Virgin Mary in past artwork, research, and personal collections. Here, DeFreitas offers a glimpse into her preoccupation with this figure, who is the symbol par excellence of grace embodied as the eternal mother—a figure who carries other names and likenesses across many cultures and spiritual practices.
Several of the tableaus feature Polaroid photographs from an earlier series titled we are reservoirs (2020–21), where over the course of several months DeFreitas engaged in a daily ritual of photographing the sun in attempts to capture an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Others display research material that informs the series, including historical accounts of apparitions of the Virgin Mary, and reference material about the origin of the “Black Virgin.” Some historians attribute the darker skin of these globally prevalent statues to the patina of time, while others suggest inculturation or a Christian appropriation of pagan traditions. DeFreitas’ interest in the Black Virgin honours her grandmother, one of the women who cared for the Black Madonna of La Divina Pastora Church in Siparia, Trinidad.
Each of the artist’s images depicts her hands engaging with the objects in quotidian gestures of touching, cradling, and pointing, which also embody a grace evocative of religious statuary, as if by mimicking these graceful gestures DeFreitas is practicing an embodied empathy. By tapping into intuition, ritual, and gesture, she demonstrates how objects and bodies carry deep histories, and how close attunement can evoke energies beyond the material and rational to perhaps commune with states of grace.
Curated by Farah Yusuf
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, among others. 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.
