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 impart significance to moments of transition. These symbolic practices do not magically reorder the world, rather they provide an internal sense of comfort and order as a way to cope with what has become disorderly.

Much of Erika DeFreitas’ practice addresses themes of loss, grief, and communion with feminine energies beyond the realm of the ordinary. The five tableaus 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 that occurs with other names and likenesses across many cultures and spiritual practices. 

Several of the tableaus feature Polaroids from an earlier series titled we are reservoirs, where over the course of several months DeFreitas engaged in a daily ritual of photographing the sun in an attempt to capture an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Others display research material informing the series including historical accounts of Virgin Mary apparitions 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. All of the images depict the artist’s 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, DeFreitas demonstrates how objects and bodies carry deep histories and how close attunement can evoke energies beyond the material and rational to perhaps commune with a state of grace.

This program of images concludes This Unfathomable Weight, a three-part exhibition which animates outdoor lightboxes across the UTM campus and billboards in Mississauga throughout the 2022-2023 academic year. The exhibition grapples publicly with how we make sense of living through the massive crises of recent years. Through an understanding of trauma as a psychic rupture, where meaning-making has been suspended, deferred, or displaced, the project carves out space for reparative gestures of across personal, societal and spiritual registers.

 —Farah Yusuf