@ chantalgibsonartist Vancouver BC
@ chantalgibsonartist Vancouver BC
Artists: Natalie Asumeng, La Tanya S. Autry, Tony Cokes, Chantal Gibson, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Martine Syms
Inspired by Claudia Rankine’s scholarship on microaggressions in Citizen: An American Lyric and themes of perceptibility, Labour seeks to unveil the invisible labour of the colonized. The exhibition challenges societal racial biases through the lens of Blackness and Indigeneity, exploring, among other concerns, how unseen labour might be unburdened and shifted onto the dominant. The evocative works of Natalie Asumeng, La Tanya S. Autry, Tony Cokes, Chantal Gibson, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Martine Syms examine white supremacy’s manifestation in institutional power paradigms and its corrosive effects on Black and Indigenous people and people of colour. In so doing, this exhibition operationalizes and reveals unseen labour while activating alternative teachings from Black and Indigenous perspectives. Labour asks, what are the motivations for our inclusion in institutional spaces? Who has the right to tell our stories? What is our right to rage in the face of microaggressions and discriminatory acts? And how can we employ much-needed rest as a form of resistance? Featuring an electrifying mix of audio, video, textual, and immersive works, Labour creates a powerful sensory experience that disrupts conventional narratives. By reimagining how the colonized perceive, engage with, and ultimately challenge the forces that shape our world, Labour becomes a powerful site of defiance.
Images by C. Gibson: Epigraph: Still Life with Black Girl, Theory, White Folks and Fruit (2024) and Swatch Book with Self-Regulation and Pinking Shears (2024).
Artists: Nura Ali, Aleesa Cohene, Darija Radakovic, Chantal Gibson, Jeannie Mah, Esmaa Mohamoud, Nurgul Rodriguez, Marigold Santos, Farihah Shah, Florence Yee, Jin-me Yoon and Shellie Zhang.
The exhibition is presented in partnership with the MacKenzie Art Gallery.
Human Capital presents work that offers insight into the impact of Canada’s immigration policies and history: how it treats humans as capital, and the role it plays in shaping the complex and contested formation of a “Canadian identity.”
Canada, like most Western nations, has a long history of immigration campaigns that promise economic prosperity to both the state and immigrants. As a result, Canadian immigration policies have historically focused on maximizing economic contributions while minimizing disruption to the “fundamental character of the Canadian population,” as remarked by Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King in 1947.
Canada’s current, points-based immigration system, in place since 1967, attempts to provide a non-discriminatory framework for assessing individuals and collectives and directing them to strategic economic and geographic sectors. Once inside Canada, new immigrants are expected to boost the country’s economy by producing more for less. The system has little regard for existing marginalized communities, as it continues to reinforce “Canadian values” with an ever-growing intake of immigrants, whose admittance is driven primarily by the economic demands of the country. For all these reasons, the exhibition asks: What else is lost when human potential is measured as units of capital?
In un/titled, Chantal Gibson continues her work with black souvenir spoons, creating a series of portraits that speak to themes of gendered and generational (dis)connection, (dis)placement and re(dis)covery. 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.
Presented as a gallery and online exhibition, Nostalgia Interrupted highlights the reminiscence and perseverance of BIPOC communities through lens-based media, text, and installation. Eschewing whitewashed notions of sanguine sentimentalism as portrayed by a dominant hierarchy, this exhibition explores the aspirations, resistance, and heartbreak of marginalized communities within the context of systemic racism, xenophobia, and oppression.
Nostalgia Interrupted offers space for marginalized communities to share the memories, heritage, and experiences which shape their reality. This is vital not for explanation or debate — for the marginalized need not justify their presence — but for reclamation and resistance.
Works in the DMG by Chantal Gibson, Caroline Monnet, Howardena Pindell, Dima Srouji, and Shellie Zhang
Written by: Linda Kanyamuna, SFU Student
Since November of 2020, Vancouverites have been consuming the resilience, energy, and beauty of Black womanhood through visual art in the form of a 240 foot photo-poetic art installation un/settled. The piece, which resides at the intersection of West Hastings and Richards Street occupying SFU Belzberg Library’s large windows, embodies Blackness and everything that celebrates Black creativity.
The artwork features stunning poetry written by writer and academic Dr. Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, and portrait imagery of artist-educator Chantal Gibson. On February 10, both Black creatives, along with SFU Belzberg head librarian Ebony Magnus, shared dialogue for upholding Black voices through art in an enticing panel that aimed to unpack the presence of Black bodies in urban public spaces...
Unwriting the Centre: Award-winning teacher, poet and visual artist Chantal Gibson reflects on what it means to be a writing teacher in this time of EDI, AI and decolonization, drawing on examples and artefacts from her teaching practice.
Canadian Writing Centres Conference
Zoom Wednesday May 24th
Online Poetry Reading and conversation.
Sunday March 12 at 2pm.
Award-winning Vancouver poet Chantal Gibson joins Chase Keetley to discuss her latest poetry collection with/holding.
Saturday January 22 at 1:00pm.
20th Anniversary of Dionne Brand's
A Map to the Door of No Return
Digital gathering November 3-6, 2021
Human Capital... offers insight into the impact of Canada’s immigration policies and history: how it treats humans as capital, and the role it plays in shaping the complex and contested formation of a “Canadian identity.”
Grammar of Loss, Studies in Erasure Solo exhibition at Open Space, Victoria January 2020.
2020 Online Exhibition
Thoughts on Liberation, CanadianArt June 17, 2020.
Black scholars, activists and artists respond to the present moment—Christina Battle, Dionne Brand, Denise Ferreira da Silva, El Jones, Robyn Maynard, Charmaine Nelson and Christina Sharpe. Redacted Text, 2019 in Canadian Art.
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