Erika DeFreitas' Untitled Textile works
In this series of works, DeFreitas alters a single piece of found printed textile by cutting, ripping, folding (sometimes along pre-existing creases), and rearranging this material into different configurations. She then weaves other materials such as thread, cello tape, masking tape, painter’s tape, iron-on fusing tape, straight pins, and safety pins into the arrangement. Each layer or material addition is no more important than any other: together they create a kind of landscape of relations.
Erika DeFreitas, untitled (these textile works) No. 29, 2015. Found fabric and pins. Courtesy of the artist.
Stein often called her plays landscapes since she wondered what rendered some things ground to others. She was fascinated by how landscapes troubled questions of gestalt. In Portraits and Repetition, Stein says, “if it were possible that a movement were lively enough it would exist so completely that it would not be necessary to see it moving against anything to know that it is moving.” The landscape analogy provided a way in which to think about these things, in particular why dramatic action is set within a scene when the scene itself could be a subject. Here DeFreitas’ textiles works are installed over top of wallpaper that is derived from these works: character and setting become interchangeable.
GO BACK TO we have displaced them because we have replaced them
