FROM OCTOBER 2017 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

Last year, while plans to create the West End Phoenix were afoot, Dave Bidini happened upon an exhibit by artist Erika DeFreitas, at the Angell Gallery on Dupont Street, that included scissored obituaries coated in beeswax.

He was encouraged to see someone else using newsprint as their chosen medium, to say nothing of the beauty of the work, lying in small stacks on a tabletop. This month, he sat down with DeFreitas to discuss her work, much of which uses newspaper clippings to communicate her ideas about absence and presence, and making the ephemeral last.

DAVE BIDINI: What are some of your earliest memories?

ERIKA DeFREITAS: It starts with my mom, Cita DeFreitas. She’s a first-generation Canadian from Guyana, and she came over when she was only 18 years old, the youngest in the family. She was sent by my grandmother, Angela DeFreitas, who wanted a better life for her and the kind of job women couldn’t get back home. She stayed with her extended family in Scarborough but it didn’t work out. She had to find somewhere else, alone in the city, but she managed it.

She has always worked and survived and never had time for a social life. She took care of two little kids and then one night when I was in Grade 6, my dad left us; he just disappeared. We didn’t speak about what happened, and we still don’t. A lot goes unspoken in our family, as it does in many others.

DB: How were you first exposed to art, and where did you get hooked on the gig?

ED: A lot of my early exposure to art – handiwork in lace and crochet – came through my grandma [via my mom], and even though I never met her, I feel like I know her through the work. I have all of these things that my grandmother made, like doilies. Some people might look at them and say, ‘Get them out of here.’ But for me, the fact that the thread was between her fingers and she’d knotted the ends is important to me. The doily itself is a marking of time. I can’t measure the marking any other way.

DB: I have a friend who once took acid and stared at a doily for five hours.

ED: [Laughing] I can see it! There’s a relationship there with the object. A lot of my history and memory is inherited through these objects, and because so much within a family is unspoken, they play a valuable role in bringing people together.

DB: As a kid, where were your places of creativity?

ED: The routine for me was always making art in my bedroom. In fact, when Jalani [Morgan, Phoenix photo editor] asked about coming over to shoot, I told him: ‘It hasn’t changed: my studio is my home, and you’re still gonna find me making art on my bed.’ Growing up, I had a nanny who let me draw, and one day I used a purple crayon to draw my name on her couch, so maybe it started there.

The first time I ever showed anything was in Grade 1 or 2, when I submitted a drawing of myself to the Markham Fair. I still have it framed in my room. The fair was important because it was an affirmation of my mom’s support: She always pushed us forward. I was lucky my mom never questioned whether art was a valuable thing to produce. Seeing the ribbon placed on the drawing was exciting, but it was more than that. To this day, it’s a reminder that this has been in me forever.

DB: You’ve worked a lot with newspapers, which is one of the reasons we wanted to reach out. What do you find compelling about newsprint, and papers, as both a medium, and as media?

ED: What I like about newspapers versus, say, the internet is that, with papers, there’s a static nature that allows you to go back. The internet is running so fast that I don’t even know what happened yesterday because what happened yesterday means almost nothing; three seconds ago something just happened that changed it.

I like to be able to go back and pause and I like that we have an object that is a stamping of what happened in that moment. I feel we miss this. There’s an authority behind a newspaper, whereas the internet is so vast. The idea of going to press is a huge commitment. Trusting yourself is huge. How many times have we seen something posted on the internet where people say, ‘I didn’t say that’? That’s not the case in print. The internet allows you to change things around, but in a paper, once it’s out there, it’s out there.

DB: Were you guys a big newspaper family growing up?

ED: My mom read the morning paper every day. She read the obituaries, so I started reading them too, and after a while I felt like I knew the people I was reading about. Eventually I cut them out – it was a gesture of care as much as anything – and [used in my art pieces] a few words that resonated with me [this became the 2008 University of Toronto show “Deaths/Memorials/Births”]. It was vital that I was using newspaper, because, like the body itself, it’s ephemeral. That people were using it to write memories of other people was important to me.

DB: How did that lead to the recent exhibit at the Angell Gallery?

ED: After cutting out the obituaries, I archived them in a little black box. I didn’t have it in me to throw them away, and it wasn’t until years later that I knew what to do with them. I decided to dip the strips in beeswax five times as a way of protecting and preserving them, tying in the folklore of bees, their historical literature, where Egyptians talk about the connection between bees and the underground, and how, in Greek mythology, they’re mentioned as part of the afterlife.

DB: In many ways, the show is a stunning confirmation of the lasting power of newsprint. Was that a point you wanted to establish?

ED: Well, a lot of my work is about the transient nature of permanence, and newspapers reflect that idea. Newspapers are also interesting because they travel: not just by way of location, but through time. We use newspapers to line dressers or put behind drywall, and people are discovering old newspapers all the time. Even though the material disintegrates, they have a weird longevity, which is lovely. I also really like how it changes colour over time. It’s very interesting that one material exhibits all of these things.

DB: Along with your crocheted pieces, you work with other fabrics and Kleenex; you seem drawn to fragile and vulnerable materials that you can claw open or tear apart. Why do you think that is?

ED: Part of it is tied to the idea of making the impermanent permanent, which is also tied to the fact that, if anything, I’ve mastered failure. I’m really good at failing because I’m working with concepts and materials that can’t last. They’re all dependent on something else, compared to, say, making something out of concrete, which is built to stand the test of time. For me, it may go back to the idea of nostalgia, and looking at things that other people might take for granted. The word “nostalgia” – I still have to put some work into the etymology of it, and where it plays in contemporary theory – has a lot of trauma in there. The past is very traumatic, and nostalgia is a way for us to work through that. At the same time, nostalgia gives us something to hold on to as a way of getting to the future.

DB: Speaking of nostalgia, did you notice the yellow typewriter near the entrance of the café?

ED: I did.

DB: Did you see the name on the front?

ED: No.

DB: It says “Erika.”

ED: [laughing] What?! It might just have to find a way of disappearing.