Dos Amigos (Slave Boat)

Art Gallery of Ontario

Dos Amigos (Slave Boat) 1993 acrylic on canvas Collection of Cadillac Fairview Audio description of the work This work is an abstract painting in a landscape orientation. It is 9 feet or almost 3 meters tall by 14 feet or around 4 meters wide. Taking up the majority of the canvas is an architectural structure shaped like a capsule which is broken open. It is composed of black and white cross hatched lines. Above it the sky is a crosshatched grey and white. Where the capsule breaks, the space between is filled with intersecting white lines forming an X. The lines in this work range in thickness from very refined to very thick. The vertical lines are the thickest, they appear in front of the structure. The left half is higher than the right and takes up the top two thirds of the canvas while the right half takes up the lower two thirds of the canvas. End of Audio description. Exhibition label text: The early 1990s signaled Thomasos’s shift into abstraction. In this work, she references the transatlantic slave trade—specifically, the claustrophobic boats constructed to transport enslaved Africans to the Americas. These structures of confinement would continue to preoccupy her research. Thomasos uses line to convey the inhumane conditions of the boats, arranging the black marks in a way to suggest a suffocating cage. The title, Dos Amigos, references a 19th-century slave ship that carried enslaved Africans to Cuba. Using an unassuming palette of black, white, and grey, and employing a deceptively simple painting vocabulary of gridded latticework, Thomasos creates a visual experience that conjures the stifling intensity of a ship’s hold. End of Exhibition label text.