Chantal Gibson | un/titled. Portraits
to
Wil Aballe Art Projects 1129 East Hastings Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6A 1S3
Chantal Gibson, "Nana," 2022
souvenir spoons, acrylic paint, restored display box circa. 1970s, 12 x 15 in. Image courtesy of the Gallery.
Playing with size, scale and perspective, Gibson transforms a small, vintage spoon into large photographs, revealing a sailing vessel big enough to wonder who’s inside? Each blackened ornament is a holder of memory, each body a portrait of a time, a place, a transaction.
CHANTAL GIBSON is an award-winning writer-artist-educator living on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. Working in the overlap between literary and visual art, her work confronts colonialism head on, imagining the BIPOC voices silenced in the spaces and omissions left by cultural and institutional erasure. Her visual art has been exhibited at the ROM, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Open Space Victoria, the MacKenzie Art Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of Anthropology, and the Senate of Canada. She is currently exhibiting in the exhibition, Nostalgia Interrupted, at the Doris McCarthy Gallery in Toronto.
Her debut book of poetry, How She Read (Caitlin Press, 2019) explores the representation of Black women in Canadian history, art, literature. It won the 2020 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the 2020 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the prestigious 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her follow up collection with/holding (Caitlin Press, 2021) examines the representation of Blackness across digital media. A 2021 3M National Teaching Fellow, Gibson teaches writing and design communication in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.
This exhibition runs from Sept 24 – Oct 15 and Nov 1- Nov 26, 2022.