Join the Esker Foundation in opening the winter 2025 season with three new solo exhibitions by Hangama Amiri, Erika DeFreitas, and Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi.

Hangama Amiri creates intricately layered textile compositions that muse on home, kinship, and memory. Amiri's focus on textiles also nod to familial bonds – her mother taught her to sew – and to long, diverse histories of feminist textile-based practices. Amiri’s work can be read as the expression and excavation of memory, connection, and kinship through material and process.

In 2011, a team of researchers deduced woman who lived in the middle ages 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. This exchange of artist and material, body and mineral, sparked a realm of inquiry and exploration for artist Erika DeFreitas to search for absences within the canon of art history.

Interweaving family lore, mythology, science fiction, and digital abstraction, ThuyHan Nguyen-Chi’s 2022 film Into The Violet Belly follows the collaboration between the artist and her mother, Thuyen Hoa, who fled Vietnam after the end of the American War via a near-calamitous sea journey.

Further details about the artists and event can be found here.

Where: Esker Foundation
When: January 24, 6-9 pm

 

Photo Credit: Erika De Freitas, "The Black Madonnas Of Perpetual Murmurs 1, 11, 14," collage, gold leaf, cut on paper. 2023. Courtesy of the artist, and Christie Contemporary, Toronto.