In partnership with The Witch Institute, Minor Hockey Curatorial is proud to present ‘A Gesture, A Reading: Finding Touch in Occult Practices and Performance Art’ featuring virtual performances by Erika DeFreitas and Maggie Groat on Saturday, August 21, at 7pm EST.
Exploring themes of gesture, touch, and incantation, this event will contemplate how haptic and oral rituals are taken up within the disparate realms of contemporary performance art and the occult.
ARTIST PRINTS:
In conjunction with their performances, Erika DeFreitas and Maggie Groat have created a limited number of physical artist prints to be mailed out in advance of the performances. To request prints, email minorhockeycuratorial@gmail.
ACCESSIBILITY:
Please email minorhockeycuratorial@gmail.
Artists:
Minor Hockey Curatorial (Curators)
Minor Hockey Curatorial is a collaboration between Northern Ontario-based curators Robin Alex McDonald and Alexander Rondeau. Formed in January 2019, Minor Hockey uses curation to investigate topics related to queerness, rurality, and social justice. Previous exhibitions include ‘Above the Belt, Below the Bush’ (ft. Adrienne Crossman, Danya Danger, Tyler Matheson, Dominic Pinney, Walter K. Scott, and Jordyn Stewart) and 'Pressure Cracks,’ (ft. Megan Feheley, jenna dawn maclellan, Christine Negus, Emily Pelstring, and Jon Sasaki.)
Erika DeFreitas
Erika DeFreitas is a Scarborough-based artist whose practice includes the use of performance, photography, video, installation, textiles, works on paper, and writing. Placing an emphasis on process, gesture, the body, documentation, and paranormal phenomena, she works through attempts to understand concepts of loss, post-memory, inheritance, and objecthood. DeFreitas’ work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including at Project Row Houses and the Museum of African American Culture, Houston; Fort Worth Contemporary Arts; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita; Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery; Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts, Winnipeg; and Gallery 44, Toronto. A recipient of the Toronto Friends of Visual Artist’ 2016 Finalist Artist Prize, the 2016 John Hartman Award, and longlisted for the 2017 Sobey Art Award, she has also been awarded several grants from the Canada Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. DeFreitas holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.
Maggie Groat
Maggie Groat is an artist who strategically mobilizes a range of media including works on paper, sculpture, textiles, site-specific interventions, and publications to interrogate methodologies of collage and salvage practices. Her current research engages a meandering and expansive interdisciplinary approach, surrounding possibilities of site-responsiveness, decolonial ways-of-being, gardens, slowness, margins, utility and beauty, the transformative potentials of found and ritual materials, domestic space and its relation to caregiving and becoming, powerful images, the double, the otherworldly, and the influences of the astronomical on the terrestrial. Her practice is informed by her Skarú:ręʔ and Settler backgrounds, her role as a mother, and the environmental impacts of the Anthropocene. She lives with her partner and three children on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, Chonnonton, and Anishnaabeg.
