Her grandmother taught baking and cake decorating classes at home in Guyana, which later influenced DeFreitas' work The Impossible Speech Act (2007).
[3][4][5] Through a postcolonial lens, Erika DeFreitas explores language, cultural loss and identity politics and places emphasis on process, the gesture and documentation.
[13] DeFreitas continued the manipulation and examination of her body versus objects in a series of photographs called I Am Not Tragically Colored (after Zora Neale Hurston) where she distorted her face against a piece of glass that separated the viewer and herself.
[26] Their collaborative textile work entitled Sometimes the Metonymic Object Is an Absence, a crochet blanket mimicking those in their family home, that visitors are invited to unravel,[27] was included in The One and the Many: A Self-Portrait in Seven Parts, a 2015 group exhibition at Project Row Houses (Houston, TX).
[28] Her work has also been presented in many group exhibitions, including at the Art Gallery of Windsor (Windsor, ON);[29] Aljira, a Center of Contemporary Art (Newark, NJ);[30] Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Toronto, ON),[31] and Houston Museum of African American Culture (Houston, TX)[32] Her work was featured alongside artists Sheila Pree Bright, Kwesi Abbensetts and Hew Locke in an issue of Transitions Magazine themed around Black childhood.