Date:
Saturday April 30, 2022 @ 7-8:30pm
Register:
Seating is limited. Register here
Chantal Gibson returns to Open Space to discuss her latest poetry collection, "with/holding" (Caitlin Press, 2021)—a genre-blurring text that examines the representation and reproduction of Blackness across communication media and popular culture. Written in the summer of 2020, the work was inspired by Gibson’s Open Space exhibition “A Grammar of Loss: Studies in Erasure” that closed three weeks after it opened in January 2020 due to Covid 19.
Two years later, in this hybrid artist talk, Gibson will discuss her use of literary and visual art and graphic design to grapple with the seemingly insatiable buzzing-clicking-scrolling-sharing appetite for Black suffering. Drawing on the visual language of tv news, brand marketing, social media, and Add to Cart culture—Gibson will illustrate the ways her work challenges “the tyranny of copy and paste”—and confronts the new colonial machinery in its relentless consumption and commodification of Black bodies.
Image credit: B. Kadonoff
Chantal Gibson (chantalgibson.com) is an award-winning 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 across Canada and the US, including Open Space Victoria, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Montreal Museum of Fine Art, ROM Toronto, MacKenzie Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Museum of Anthropology and the Senate of Canada.
Her debut poetry collection, 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 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her follow-up collection, with/holding (Caitlin Press, 2021), a 2021 CBC Best Poetry selection, brings a critical lens to the representation and reproduction of Blackness across digital media. Recipient of the 2021 3M National Teaching Fellowship, she teaches in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.