Author Description

"Published to accompany an exhibition on Trinidadian-Canadian artist, Denyse Thomasos, co-curated by Sarah Milroy and Gaëtane Verna. Denyse Thomasos (1964-2012) was a leading Trinidadian-Canadian painter whose epic paintings gather imagery drawn from a range of sources: woven Caribbean textiles, slave ships, graveyards, villages, prison blocks, and shipyards. As Thomasos herself described her work: “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 beca