Urban Jewels Series (Dismantle #4) 1998 by Denyse Thomasos

Provenance:
Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

Literature:
Murray Whyte, “Denyse Thomasos: The late artist's early years, on display at the MacLaren Art Centre”, The Toronto Star [online], September 13, 2013

The Urban Jewels Series was completed when Thomasos was a young professor first at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, and then at Rutgers in Newark. During this period, the artist was faced head on with the overt racism of urban America, the likes of which she had never experienced. On these works of the mid-to-late 1990s, Thomasos wrote that, growing up in Toronto, “my knowledge of black culture and history was limited. My early artwork was both an attempt to capture the emotion of isolation and a means to learn about myself with respect to black culture, history and politics.”

The layered composition of “Urban Jewels Series (Dismantle #4)” explodes with agitated energy bursting from the confines of the stretched canvas. Brightly layered bars of colour crisscross and stack on top of one another, forming an abstracted urban landscape of densely packed buildings patterning the composition. Works from this series reference the architectonic, cultural and historical references related to her investigations of the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. She was also responding to her particular exploration into her personal and family identity through the formation of Diaspora in the West Indies via modern migration patterns. These works are visual representations of this interconnected patterning of human movement and settlement, fundamentally shaping urban landscapes and identities.