CHANTAL
GIBSON

dangling modifers is part of A Substance of Character/A Character of Substance (2022), a multimedia installation that examines the representation of Blackness and Black womanhood in the Canadian cultural imagination. Using altered text as a component in her work, Gibson critically responds to the story “Brother Rabbit and the Tar Baby” as it appears in Streets and Roads, a primary school reader published in Toronto in 1941. Tar Baby, a girl doll covered in tar and the only visual representation of a black or brown character in this text, is the subject of repeated abuse and violence. In smothering these texts with braids and liquid rubber, Gibson asks ‘What sticks?’ when confronting the violent persistence of anti-Black racism across the Canadian cultural imagination.