Chantal Gibson - How She Read: Confronting the Romance of Empire

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Chantal Gibson, "English History in a New Setting," 2018

mixed media

Opening Reception on Sunday, Jan. 13, 2019 from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

As their first exhibition of the New Year, Open Space artist-run centre will host Chantal Gibson’s How She Read: Confronting the Romance of Empire.

Gibson is a Vancouver-based artist and educator whose work plunges into the fraught territory of school texts and history books with a sewing needle and re-works historical Canadian texts with black thread in order to revise our ideas of history, nationhood, and how we read. Through altered book sculptures that ensnare the texts with braids and thread, redacted texts, and reprints of old children’s readers, Gibson’s work asks us to consider the voices, stories, and bodies that have been erased or excluded from historical narratives and proposes material ways in which we can resist those historical erasures.

Chantal Gibson teaches writing and visual communication in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University. As a visual artist with interests in race, gender, and history, her altered texts and installations challenge the cultural production and consumption of knowledge. At their core, her works explore power, exploiting colonial mechanisms of oppression—myths, tropes, types, and metaphors—persistent across readings, writings, and representations of Blackness and Otherness in the Canadian cultural imagination. Most recently, Gibson’s multimedia installation

Souvenir was featured in Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art at the ROM in Toronto and MBAM in Montreal. Her debut book of poetry, How She Read, will be published by Caitlin Press in January 2019.

Gibson will be in residence at Open Space from Feb. 14-21, during which time she will participate in numerous events, as well as hold open hours at the gallery. During the same time period, the University of Victoria’s McPherson Library will host a satellite exhibition featuring Gibson’s work TOME.

Thursday, Feb. 14 at 3:00 p.m.

Reading from How She Read at the University of Victoria’s McPherson Library, Room A003.

Saturday, Feb. 16 at 2:00 p.m.

Artist talk at Open Space, followed by a panel discussion on decolonization in education and cultural institutions, alongside Victoria-based educators, curators, and artists.

Tuesday, Feb. 19 at 7:30 p.m.

Book launch and reading from Gibson’s forthcoming book of poetry, How She Read, at Open Space.

All events are free and open to the public.