A Grammar of Loss: Studies in Erasure

A Grammar of Loss: Studies in Erasure

Chantal Gibson

Open Space, February 22 - March 28, 2020

This February, Vancouver-based artist-educator Chantal Gibson returns to Open Space

with A Grammar of Loss: Studies in Erasure, a show of new and recent work building on her 2019

exhibition, How She Read: Confronting the Romance of Empire.

Wielding black ink, black paint, and black liquid rubber, the exhibition explores the dis/comfort—the

ideological stickiness—of engaging in this de/colonial moment. It off ers a visually poetic response

to the questions “What does it mean to decolonize a text? And what does it really mean to confront

Empire?”

The exhibition features new digital works and altered texts, and includes Souvenir, the collection of

2000 blackened souvenir spoons that debuted at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2018, and featured

in Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art. Gibson will also transform part of the gallery

into a public art studio, bringing with her The Other James Baldwin, an ongoing altered book project

that invites visitors to engage with colonial texts of the past to reimagine the future.

Gibson will be on hand for a week-long community residency from March 21-28 which will include

workshops with educators and gallery visitors, inviting them to participate in activity and discussion

around the historical and ongoing erasure of Black, Indigenous, and racialized bodies in the Canadian

education system. Exploring methods of decentering colonial thought in the classroom, this workshop/

studio time will open space to collaborate and co-create with other artists, educators, communities,

and institutions.

An opening reception will be held Friday, Feb. 21 from 7:00-9:00 p.m.

www.openspace.ca