- About
-
News
- Overview
-
News archive
- Spring 2021
-
Fall 2020
- Announcing the winners of the Fall 2020 FCAT Photo Contest
- Announcing the 2020 FCAT Research Excellence Award recipients
- The one and only: Jo-Anne Ray recognized for 25 years of service to SFU publishing program
- Stephen Collis receives $20,000 grant to host geopoetics symposium and residency
- SFU’s Digital Democracies Institute led by Wendy Chun works to advance new technology and cultural democracy
- Interdisciplinary degree sets dance grad on unique artistic path
- Carman Neustaedter named dean of Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology
- Chantal Gibson's Senate artwork raises social awareness for Black Canadian voices
- Bernhard Riecke works with SFU PhD students to launch their VR installation Body RemiXer
- SIAT professor Carman Neustaedter shares what he has learned about online teaching during the pandemic
- Steve DiPaola of SIAT collaborates with an International team to develop VR training simulations
- Teaching in a digital world: Introducing FCAT’s new Teaching Fellow, Hannah McGregor
- SIAT alumnus partners with Mechatronic Systems Engineering professor to produce 3D-printed ventilators
- Untold internet histories: A research partnership between SFU and the London School of Economics
- Wendy Chun receives $200,000 research grant to combat fake news
- SIAT MA student Meta Vaughan receives the 2020 Terry Fox Gold Medal
- Summer 2020
- Spring 2020
- Fall 2019
- Summer 2019
- Spring 2019
- Fall 2018
- Summer 2018
- Spring 2018
- Fall 2017
- Spring 2017
- Fall 2016
- Summer 2016
- Spring 2016
- Fall 2015
- Summer 2015
- Spring 2015
- Fall 2014
- Summer 2014
- Spring 2014
- Fall 2013
- People
- Future students
- Events
- Get involved
- Research
- Current students
- COVID-19
School of Interactive Arts & Technology, Art & Design
Chantal Gibson's Senate artwork raises social awareness for Black Canadian voices
An artwork created by acclaimed writer and artist Chantal Gibson, a university lecturer in SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), is helping to challenge historic and systemic racism—from its place in the foyer outside the Canadian Senate Chamber.
The work is one of two pieces recently installed in the Senate of Canada honouring the country’s Black artists.
Gibson’s artwork, Who’s Who? is part of her mixed-media series Historical In(ter)ventions, in which she explores the omission of Black voices in Canadian historical texts by altering books with braided and twisted black cotton thread.
Gibson created the piece from a 1927 edition of Who’s Who in Canada, a work that entailed punching holes in its pages and sewing close to 2,000 threads into the sculpture.
She also incorporates into the piece a 2020 e-reader, which plays a video depicting her turning the pages of the original book.
Her unique artworks challenge Canada’s structural racism and the racist construction of history through text and other memory objects and institutions.
“Art allows us to question power and authority, and it asks the viewer to think about whose voices are included in national narratives and whose are omitted or erased,” says Gibson.
The installation was spearheaded by Senator Patricia Bovey, chair of the Senate Artwork and Heritage Advisory Working Group, to reflect within the Senate a wider representation of Canadians.
To better represent those voices, and in response to the recent rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Bovey says the installation is a first iteration of more artistic diversity to come.
“What is the point of this wall? It is essential that the Canadian voices we hear and present reflect the diversity and depth of our regions and nation,” says Bovey. “The national response to this installation has been overwhelming. May we as senators and Canadians listen and build on the messages these works convey.”
Gibson hopes the artwork, and others to follow, will highlight the critical need for a paradigm shift in society that rejects anti-Black racism.
“As an artist and educator, I see the Senate’s recognition of Black Canadian artists also reflecting the decolonial moment,” she says, “where Canadian political, cultural, and educational institutions, like SFU, are being challenged to reflect, rethink and reform the mechanisms of power that have systemically excluded, silenced and erased the voices of Black people, Indigenous people and People of Colour.
“For EDI (equity, diversity and inclusion) to work, for Black lives to really matter, we must interrogate the moment rather than tokenize it.”
Reaction to the news about her national installation from peers at SFU, where EDI is a key priority, and from colleagues around the world, has been steady.
“The accolades from within SIAT and beyond have been tremendous,” says professor and SIAT director Carman Neustaedter. “Chantal is an inspiration to us all; a voice for the voiceless.
“Her research and artwork are a critical reminder of our history, and the reality that there is so much more to do when it comes to tackling pivotal topics such as anti-racism.”
Ebony Magnus, head of SFU’s Belzberg Library and former interim library manager for SIAT, calls the honour empowering. “To see Blackness embodied in the Senate building—Black "hair" literally overtaking and reshaping deeply racist historical narratives—in a chamber that has excluded BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of colour) and their representations—is desperately overdue. Chantal's work is so deserving of this recognition and this stage.”
The other artwork, Stolen Identities, was created by Winnipeg painter Yisa Akinbolaji. The two pieces were installed Sept. 18.
Gibson, whose work has been featured in galleries and museums across the country, teaches writing and visual communication and is a founding member of SIAT.
Currently listed as one of the CBC’s 24 Canadian writers on the rise, she was shortlisted earlier this year for the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s highest awards for poetry, for How She Read (Caitlin Press, 2019).
The decolonizing book brings together two aspects of Gibson’s research, the historical misrepresentation of Black women in Canadian art and literature, and the systemic use of the English language as a mechanism of power and oppression.
The work was also recognized with the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize at the recent BC Yukon Book Awards, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, given to Canadian women writers in recognition of their impactful work.
Says Senator Bovey: "I particularly applaud and thank the artists for their visual insights, and for permission to show these works for our and Canadians' reflection."
For more on Gibson's artwork see: chantalgibson.com
F T I