Erika DeFreitas, A Teleplasmic Study with Doilies (Angie No.1), 2010 - 2011
In Erika DeFreitas’s A Teleplasmic Study with Doilies (2010-11), we see the artist sensuously engaging with her grandmother’s doilies. As if transmitting her ancestor’s spiritual energy, these hand-crocheted doilies appear to ooze out of her mouth and take on a life of their own haunting, conjuring Dr. T. G. Hamilton’s ectoplasm photographs (taken during the séances conducted in his home in Winnipeg in the early 1900s). Here the body is a medium for channeling the material manifestations of the spirit world and their felt presence. But while the processes of possession—of being possessed—are frozen in the photographic portrait, the serial nature of the works and their repetition, side-by-side, in the installation bring to life the transitional and transformative experience of the channelings effect. Repetition is rhythmic and the bright coloured doilies, set against a black background, livelily dance across the images. Rhythm and repetition are also beloved devices for Stein. Repeated words came alive on the page as movement expressions whose meter marked a minimal modality of difference though what she called “insistence” (Stein, Portraits and Repetition, 167)—a change in emphasis.
Stein’s portraits, which were the basis for her plays, captured the rhythm of a persons personality not as an image of their likeness but rather what was "of' their whole being:
“How often do we see what we have not readily recognized. I readily recognize the object that has the most perfect quality of imitation.” (Stein, Objects, 110)
What is seen in DeFreitas’ portraits are energy effects. Taking on a life of their own, objects and words and people create a melody in movement that pictures the present moment as it occassions. Rhythm is a material:
“Come up out of there is very well said when the instinct which has led to the introduction of words and music not pictures and music, not pictures and words not pictures and music and words, not pictures not music not words when the instinct which has lead to the spread of rubbing has been shed …” (Stein, Objects, 107)
Stein was very interested in making a play the essence of what happened, without telling stories. (See Plays) Here we see the essence of an event that elides description: an exact resemblance to exact resemblance.
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