Speaker Series – Artistic Approaches in Dialogue: Alex Gibson, Chantal Gibson, moderated by curatorial fellow Andrea Valentine-Lewis
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Speaker Series: Artistic Approaches in Dialogue: Responses to Jack Shadbolt – Saturday, June 6 from 1 pm to 2:30 pm | Eventbrite
Reception: 12:30PM
Talk Begins: 1:00PM
We invite you to join us for a compelling conversation that brings contemporary artistic voices into dialogue with the legacy of Jack Shadbolt. Artistic Approaches in Dialogue: Responses to Jack Shadbolt centres on the creative processes and research practices of two artists featured in One Hundred Artists Deep: Alex Gibson and Chantal Gibson (no relation). Both artists undertook deep engagement with selected works by Shadbolt from the Gordon Smith Gallery & Artists for Kids Permanent Collection, drawing from their distinct histories, identities, and artistic practices.
Through their sculptural responses, Alex and Chantal offer expanded perspectives on Shadbolt’s work and its resonance in 2026. Moderated by Curatorial Fellow Andrea Valentine-Lewis, this panel talk invites audiences to consider how contemporary art responds to artistic legacy not as something fixed, but as material to be questioned, reshaped, and revalued in the present.
Alex Gibson (b. 1994, Barbados) is a Barbadian Canadian artist based between Barbados and the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, BC). Rooted in personal experiences of queer migration, their interdisciplinary practice explores how built environments shape perception and situate relationships between bodies, space, and senses of belonging. With a particular focus on images and their conflicting truths, Gibson traces queer presence across the unstable boundaries between image, object, and site. These spaces of instability become productive openings for imagining forms of embodied knowledge which unsettle fixed meaning. Recurring themes in their work include the garden, domestic thresholds, geological formations, and challenging dominant photographic representation associated with islands and the Caribbean.
Gibson’s recent solo exhibition A hound marks its spot at Wil Aballe (Vancouver) was a selected exhibition for Capture Photography Festival 2025, and they have presented work at Gallery TPW (Toronto) in 2026. Gibson has completed residencies at Fondazione Antonio Ratti (Como, Italy) and Access Gallery (Vancouver).
Gibson has been awarded the 2025 Emerging Digital Artist Award (EQ Bank). Their work has been exhibited in Barbados, Canada, Italy, Poland, and the United States of America, and has been acquired by the Rennie Collection. Their writing has been published in Canada, Germany, and Italy. Gibson holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia.
Chantal Gibson is an award-winning writer-artist-educator living on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. Working in the overlap between literary and visual art, her critical art-making 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 widely across Canada, in galleries and educational institutions including: Open Space Artist Centre, Victoria, University of Victoria, Vancouver Art Gallery, Calgary Art Gallery, MacKenzie Art Gallery, University of Saskatchewan Galleries, the ROM, University of Toronto Museums, the Senate of Canada, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Dalhousie Art Gallery, and the Confederation Gallery in Charlottetown.
She is the author of two poetry collections. Her debut book, 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) explores the representation of blackness across digital media. Both works appear on secondary and post-secondary classroom reading lists.
A 2021 3M National Teaching Fellow, Gibson teaches writing and design communication in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.
Andrea Valentine-Lewis (she/her) is a curator and writer based on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh people, also known as Vancouver. Her exhibitions have been presented at the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art (2026), Access Gallery (2025), Equinox Gallery (2022), Burrard Arts Foundation (2022), Deluge Contemporary Art (2020), and Unit 17 (2019), with public art projects at Vancouver Art Gallery (2024) and Capture Photography Festival (2022). She currently works as a Curatorial Assistant at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where she’s assisted with ten major exhibitions and four publications over her tenure. She received an MA in Art History from McGill University and a BA in Art, Performance and Cinema Studies from Simon Fraser University. She was the 2022 recipient of the Emerging Alumni Award from SFU’s Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology, and was the inaugural Curatorial Fellow at the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art (2025/26).