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The 2008 Masters of Visual Studies

Pearl on black mirror

Works by:

Deanna Bowen, Erika de Freitas, Dara Gellman

The 2008 Masters of Visual Studies

April 1–April 12, 2008

University of Toronto Art Centre

The University of Toronto Art Centre is pleased to exhibit the thesis projects of the 2008 Master of Visual Studies graduate students: Deanna Bowen, Erika de Freitas and Dara Gellman.

Linked by their investigations of duality and mirroring, memory, absence and presence, these three solo exhibitions incorporate works in video, photography, sculpture, and audio.

Gospel by Deanna Bowen is a song of loss and longing, rejection and sorrow. The exhibition combines photographs of found hymn books, a sculptural work incorporating audio, and footage appropriated from the films Hallelujah and both versions of Imitation of Life. Bowen explores her semi-autobiographical theme of a daughter¹s rejection of mother, family, and home against the backdrop of recent North American cultural history.

Erika de Freitas’s photographs and video works examine notions of pre-mourning in the context of a mother-daughter relationship. de Freitas traces the prevention of the inevitable and the persistence of impermanence in documentation of several activities: donning a death mask, crying and saving tears, and sharing and exchanging language. Intimate and repetitious, these processes trace the metaphoric (and at times literal) internalization of the other.

In her dyad of video and installation works, Dara Gellman involves four visual elements – the pearl, the hand, the double, and the mirror/image. These transitory objects and images collectively reference the condition of knowledge provided by visual representations. Intimately and intuitively linked, these elements uncannily express concepts of both equivalence and multiplicity, troubling the certainty of objects and representations as they slide across planes of meaning.

Our Supporters

We gratefully acknowledge the project support of Manulife Financial.


Title Image: Deanna Bowen, still from Imitations of Life (A Hypothesis), 2008. Single channel video projection. 7:10 min.

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