Chantal Gibson
Artist challenges spoon-fed values of twee heirlooms.
Chantal Gibson, “Nana,” 2022
souvenir spoons, acrylic paint and restored display box, circa 1970s, 12” x 15” (courtesy WAAP, Vancouver)
Sleek black veneers cling to all surfaces in Chantal Gibson’s work. Her show, un/titled. Portraits, on until Nov. 26 at Wil Aballe Art Projects in Vancouver, is intended as a series of portraits, though not in any traditional sense. Instead, she meditates on scale, difference and knowledge, encapsulating these themes via collectible heirloom teaspoons and altered books.
The Vancouver-based artist, writer and educator’s work challenges the transmission of subtle knowledge, the broadly conditioned values and belief systems seemingly extrapolated through the air we breathe. The works in this show, photographic and sculptural, are connected by their viscous black coats, sometimes acrylic paint, sometimes liquid rubber, which frustratingly (yet sensuously) redact the engraved images on once-silver spoons, or the contents of a book, now sealed forever.
Chantal Gibson, “Untitled,” 2022
souvenir spoon and acrylic paint, installation view (courtesy WAAP, Vancouver)
Alone on a wall at the entrance of a gallery is a single teaspoon, a few inches in size, painted entirely black. To see the details of this object, dwarfed by the expanse of the white wall, you must get very close. Only then can you make out the spoon’s decorative handle: a man, probably Asian, dressed in a frogged coat and sedge hat, the familiar conical cap so associated with rice farming, pulling a rickshaw carrying a woman, probably white.
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Chantal Gibson, “un/titled. Portraits,” 2022
exhibition view at Wil Aballe Art Projects, Vancouver (courtesy WAAP)
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Chantal Gibson, “un/titled 2. Portrait.,” 2022
archival inkjet print, edition of 1 + 1 AP, 48” x 35” framed (courtesy WAAP, Vancouver)
Across from the lone spoon hang four untitled archival photographic portraits of spoons, now supremely enlarged. In the first image, the same spoon projects the object’s racist iconography, making it impossible to ignore. Next to it, a colonial ship rests atop a different spoon, so expanded you begin to wonder who might be chained in the boat’s hold.
From the spoon to the photo, from the small to the large, Gibson cuttingly asserts that twee bits of collectible racism are no small thing. The black paint sullies the spoons, preventing their use, but fails to eliminate their decorative aspects, instead magnifying the sneaky myths that radiate from their design.
Chantal Gibson, “untitled redacted text 3,” 2022
altered book and liquid rubber (“Studies in Erasure” series 2019-2022), 8” x 6” x 5” (courtesy WAAP, Vancouver)
Knowledge is sticky, Aballe tells me during my visit. It’s a statement well literalized by the rubber-coated book sculptures from Gibson’s series, Studies in Erasure. In untitled redacted text 3, a piece Gibson made this year, the book appears to have been rolled into a cylinder before it was dipped in liquid rubber. From above, it looks like a sawed-off log showing its rings, but below a small swath of paper reveals it was once a book. As you circle the work, a single word escapes the rubber: continued.
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Chantal Gibson, “Black Futures I.” (left) and “Black Futures II.,” 2022
wood frame, canvas and liquid rubber, each 23.5” x 19.5” (courtesy WAAP, Vancouver)
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Chantal Gibson, “braided study 4,” 2019
cotton thread and liquid rubber (“Studies in Erasure” series 2019-2022), installation view (courtesy WAAP, Vancouver)
The tarry substance clings to other things. It soaks through the canvas in Black Futures I. and Black Futures II., licking the edges of a once-gold frame. It also coats a long braid made from cotton thread, braided study 4, that hangs from the ceiling.
The liquid rubber has a strikingly toxic affect – sensitive viewers might feel an encroaching or cloying anxiety. I hear the guilty cries of Lady Macbeth in my head, “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” ■
Chantal Gibson, un/titled. Portraits, at Wil Aballe Art Projects in Vancouver from Sept. 24 to Nov. 26, 2022.
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Wil Aballe
1375 Railspur Alley, Vancouver, British Columbia V6H 3R7
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Call ahead until Jan 16, 2025.
