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 exploration for Erika DeFreitas to extend her ongoing search for absences and omissions within the canon of art history. and that break is the one that shows (to shift, a curve, to quiver) brings together new and recent works that commune with a constellation of women in a multi-part dialogue that transcends space and time. DeFreitas’ process is one of forging matrilineal connections; her work unfolds in conversation and collaboration with her mother, niece, and grandmothers.  She also shares space with a more extended group of women of both personal and cultural significance who, in the artist’s words, “exist in the margins.” These women include Gertrude Stein, whose words in Tender Buttons inspired the exhibitions title.

The medieval scribe is one of many women present in what is left is restless and resembles light – as we are seen, a series of nine works that intuitively coalesce multiple veins of DeFreitas’ research. To begin this work, DeFreitas transcribed a chapter from a book of automatic writings called “Cautions”—a text of great personal resonance. Each page is then illuminated with images, fragments, and notes that speak to spirit photography and the occult, diagnoses of “hysteria” in 19th century women, and depictions of death and loss in medieval illuminated manuscripts.

During a 2017 residency in Trinidad and Tobago, DeFreitas felt inexplicably drawn to the statue of the Black Madonna of La Divina Pastora Church in Siparia. After returning home, she learned that her paternal grandmother was amongst a community of women who tended to this statue. In response, DeFreitas created a series of petite, jewel-like collages intended to echo her grandmother’s act of care; each collage offers an obscured portrait of a Black Madonna and is layered abundantly with images that reference textiles, florals, or jewels. The ritualistic process of making each collage allows DeFreitas to forge a relationship with the grandmother she didn’t have the opportunity to know.

In a series of two videos, DeFreitas shares space with the unnamed subject of an 1870 painting by French artist Frédéric Bazille, Black Woman with Peonies. DeFreitas rearranges and reassembles paper cutouts of Bazille’s painting—she engages with the woman’s portrait in one video, the negative space left by her void in the other. These two poetic gestures witness the unnamed woman’s labour and her obscured presence within the canon of art history.

Facing these two videos is a work featuring DeFreitas’ mother, a relationship which forms a crucial throughline in the artist’s practice. an earnest weight in the crease features DeFreitas and her mother gently caressing hands—a profoundly intimate gesture that speaks to the expression of familial bonds through process and performance.

The exhibition gestures to the future with a new series of photographs that were developed in collaboration with DeFreitas’ young niece. a mark is that which holds a quiet (Khaleh and Layla) brings together several threads of DeFreitas’ artistic interests: the female form and its representation within the canon of art history, how meaning is forged through collaboration and process, the revelatory potential of negative space, and the possibility of what is contained within—and is despite of—absence or omission. Collectively, 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 Magazine, January 10, 2019.