The Art of with/holding: An Artist Talk with Poet Chantal Gibson

Poet writer and teacher Chantal Gibson comes to the CRAG 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. In conversation with the Gibson’s series of redacted texts in The Chorus is Speaking this hybrid artist talk-poetry reading will discuss the ways her literary and visual work challenges “the tyranny of copy and paste”—and confronts the new colonial machinery in its relentless consumption and commodification of Black bodies.

*No photography or recording of this event is permitted* 

Bio: 

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.

Host or Publisher Campbell River Art Gallery