[BCMA] Art Gallery of Greater Victoria -- Denyse Thomasos: Odyssey

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*Denyse Thomasos*

*Odyssey  *

November 27, 2021 – February 20, 2022

Curated by Gaëtane Verna and Sarah Milroy


Denyse Thomasos: Odyssey

• AGGV to host only stop in Western Canada

• Organized by McMichael Canadian Art Collection

The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria presents the ground-breaking and much
anticipated  exhibition Denyse Thomasos: Odyssey, opening on Nov. 27 with a
free Public Open  House, from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

"We are grateful that our community will have the opportunity to experience
the powerful  work of Denyse Thomasos. Work that has the capacity to
provoke in us questions,  curiosity, and a range of emotions that connect
deeply with the human condition,” said  AGGV Curator of Engagement, Nicole
Stanbridge. “This is articulated so poignantly by Esi  Edugyan, the
Victoria-based award-winning novelist, who contributed a moving and
insightful essay to the exhibitions catalogue that references how Thomasos'
work lives in  a place of tension between things, like freedom and
confinement, Edugyan states; "the  work is subtle and refuses to show us
what we expect to see.”

The exhibition is co-curated by Gaëtane Verna, Director of The Power Plant
Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, and Sarah Milroy, Chief Curator of the
McMichael  Canadian Art Collection. The show brings together more than 50
works from every phase  of Denyse Thomasos’ (1964–2012) career, celebrating
her historic contribution to  Canadian art.

Denyse Thomasos was a Trinidadian-Canadian artist whose epic paintings
incorporate  imagery from a range of sources, including Caribbean textiles,
historic slave ships,  industrial shipyards, graveyards, villages and
maximum security prisons.

Thomasos explained her choice of subject matter in an artist statement in
2012, shortly  before her untimely death: “I was struck by the
premeditated, efficient, dispassionate  records of human beings as cargo
and also by the deplorable conditions of the slave  ships—so many Africans
stacked and piled into the tiny, airless holds. In my artworks, I  used
lines in deep space to recreate these claustrophobic conditions, leaving no
room to  breathe. To capture the feeling of confinement, I created three
large-scale black-and white paintings of the structures that were used to
contain slaves—and left such  catastrophic effects on the black psyche: the
slave ship, the prison, and the burial site.  These became archetypal for
me. I began to reconstruct and recycle their forms in all of  my works.”

The structures that confine and define us — whether political, social or
architectural —  served as the subject of her works. With her lush
painterly approach, Thomasos  compounded these subjects into form and
colour. The result is a body of work that recalls  the history of the
African diaspora with boundless energy and force. Thomasos’ art enacts  a
delicate balance between representation and abstraction, and holds a unique
place in  the history of Canadian art, adding to a narrative from which
Black, Indigenous, and  people of colour’s voices have for too long been
excluded. The McMichael’s exhibition  gathers works from all phases of
Thomasos’ career in celebration of her historic  contribution.


About the Artist

Denyse Thomasos was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, emigrating with her
family to Toronto at the age of six, where they joined the city’s  dynamic
Afro-Caribbean community. She studied at the University of Toronto and Yale
School of Art, eventually taking up a teaching  position at Rutgers
University. Her extensive international travels and research fuelled her
understanding of the histories and legacies of  oppression, examining the
ways in which we organize ourselves in physical and social space.

Denyse Thomasos: Odyssey is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue
including a curatorial conversation between Verna and Milroy, as  well as
an essay by illustrious Victoria based author Esi Edugyan. The catalogue is
available at the AGGV Gallery Shop.

The exhibition runs through Feb. 20, 2022 with support from TD Ready
Commitment.

For more information visit aggv.ca

Media Contact:

See aggv.ca for details

Sandra Hudson

250-216-1380

media at aggv.ca


*Photo Credits:*

Denyse Thomasos (1964–2012)

*Sparrow,* 2010

Acrylic on canvas

152.4 x 182.9 c m

© Courtesy of the Estate of Denyse Thomasos and Olga Korper Gallery


Denyse Thomasos (1964–2012)
Odyssey, 2011
Acrylic on canvas
185.4 x 243.8 cm
© Courtesy of the Estate of Denyse Thomasos and Olga Korper Gallery



Art Gallery of Greater Victoria  1040 Moss Street



*With deep gratitude for living and working on these beautiful lands of the
Lkwungen people, the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.*
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