Watch this page for events from STAC and the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts.
Current and Upcoming Events
IACC Creative Salon
Experimental Forms of Writing and/in Translation
For the Research Centre in Interdisciplinary Arts and Creative Culture’s January 2025 Creative Salon, we invite participants for an open discussion on “Experimental Forms of Writing and/in Translation.” We wish to explore non-traditional forms of writing, inscribing, tracing, and material communication. The conversation will be informal and grounded in practice and process.
Open-ended and vulnerable, creative experimental practice is nevertheless determined by material conditions. How do we understand the notion of experimental in the context of our work? What role does it play? To what extent are the material conditions we work in and with generative? When do they become constraints? How does our work negotiate the forms and fields we find ourselves in? The ways in which we think and move through material forms of communication can be understood as translations, as shifts between different systems of meaning-making, as transitions from one form to another (or several). Artists and authors are invited to share and discuss their work in the context of these questions and in relation to experimentation and translation.
Walker Cultural Leader Series: Jaumes Privat & Stuart Reid
Stuart Reid and Jaumes Privat
Curator’s Talk on “Occitan Border Lines” by Jaumes Privat
Monday, Mar 3, 2025, 5-7 p.m.
MWS 156
Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine & Performing Arts
15 Artists’ Common, St. Catharines
In Winter 2025 (24 February-31 March 2025), STAC’s Museum in the Hallway will present Jaumes Privat: “Occitan Border Lines,” an exhibition of Privat’s small-size paper works combining Occitan texts and images. Stuart Reid and Catherine Parayre will give a curators’ talk on “Occitan Border Lines” and cultural mediation. As a non-speaker of Occitan, Reid will focus on conceptual elements in Privat’s visual practice. Parayre, a scholar in contemporary Occitan literature, will contextualise the exhibition from an Occitan perspective.
Jaumes Privat is a visual artist and poet from Aveyron in the South of France. He has been engaged in exploring his creative process since 1968. He publishes his written work in Occitan magazines and writes texts for contemporary Occitan music composers, such as Nicolas Wohred and Luc Aussibal. Privat also creates hand-bound artist books (“los faisses”), which he produces in his studio in La Taillade.
Stuart Reid has over 30 years of experience as a senior manager in the not-for-profit sector. He joined Community Foundation Grey Bruce, Owen Sound, Ontario as Executive Director in 2016 after serving for over four years at Brock University as director of Rodman Hall Art Centre. An award-winning writer, Reid has published numerous articles and exhibition catalogues.
Catherine Parayre is the Director of Studies in Arts and Culture and a faculty member in both STAC and the Department of Modern Languages.
Walker Cultural Leader Series: Georgette LeBlanc & Julien Besse
Georgette LeBlanc
Reading & Translation
Thursday, Mar 6, 2025, 4-7 p.m.
MWS 156 / The Film House
Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine & Performing Arts
15 Artists’ Common, St. Catharines /
First Ontario Performing Arts Centre
250 St. Paul Street, St. Catharines
Translator Julien Besse performs a ‘flawed’ translation during a reading by Governor General’s Award-winning poet Georgette LeBlanc.
Hosted in partnership with The Small Walker Press.
Georgette LeBlanc was born in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and lives in Moncton (le Coude), New Brunswick. She holds a Doctorate of Letters from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette is the author of cycle of novels in free verse, including Prudent, a finalist for the 2014 Governor General’s Prize in Poetry and Le Grand Feu (2016). Her literary translation Océan from English into Acadian French won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation in 2020. Her poetry collection Petits poèmes sur mon père qui est mort was launched in spring 2022. She is director of the Acadie Tropicale collection at Éditions Perce-Neige, member of the editorial board of the creative literary journal Ancrages and of the Editorial board of UL Press in Louisiana. Georgette LeBlanc is a lecturer in creative writing in the French studies department at the Université de Moncton.
Julien Besse (Montreal, Quebec) is an English-French translator specializing in the translation of graphic novels, essays, novels and short Stories, screenplays and subtitling, as well as oral history. In 2018, his translation of Seth Tobocman’s Quartier en guerre was part of the official selection at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, France. He is a member of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada / Association des traducteurs et traductrices littéraires du Canada (ATTLC/LTAC).
Recent Events
Walker Cultural Leader Series: Marc-Alexandre Dumoulin
Marc-Alexandre Dumoulin
Art-Making: Happy Little Accidents and Utter Chaos: A Creative Salon
Friday, Sept 6, 2024, 2-5 p.m.
Niagara Artists Centre
354 St Paul St, St. Catharines, ON L2R 3N2
Free event, open to the public, registration required.
To register, please contact stac@brocku.ca
Montréal based visual artist Marc-Alexandre Dumoulin leads an open discussion on the accidental and chaotic nature of the creative process at Niagara Artists Centre.
Accidental Details: A Creative Walk
Saturday, Sept 7, 2024, 10 a.m.-12 p.m.
Beginning at MWS Lobby: Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine & Performing Arts
15 Artists’ Common, St. Catharines
Admission free, registration required
To register, please contact stac@brocku.ca
Marc-Alexandre Dumoulin leads a creative walk in the vicinity of the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts.
Creative Salon
The Creative Salon offers an opportunity for artists and authors based in St. Catharines and the Niagara Region to meet with peers and discuss creative practice. Marc-Alexandre Dumoulin will moderate a shared conversation about the experience of art-making as “utter chaos; a mess of happy little accidents.”
The Creative Walk will be an experience of “accidental details,” during which participants are invited to document their observations in any creative form they wish (drawing, creative writing, sound recording, photography).
Marc-Alexandre Dumoulin (active in Montreal, Canada and Vienna, Austria) is a Franco-Ontarian. He studied Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montréal and at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London, Great-Britain. In 2022 he obtained a Ph.D. in Art and Cultural Science from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria. His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Europe, North America, and North Africa. Dumoulin’s paintings, drawings, and etchings are thoughts that reveal their complexity through the sensual connection of colors, themes, and formats.
Artist’s website: https://www.marcalexandredumoulin.com/
Walker Cultural Leader Series: Small Walker Press Book Launch: Blurs and Vagueness series
Midnight Deer Abstractions (Geoff Farnsworth / Erin Knight) and A Glossary of Illegibility (Linda Carreiro / Lan “Florence” Yee)
Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, 4-6 p.m.
Someday Books
21 King St Suite B, St. Catharines
The Small Walker Press publishes collaborative work that brings together authors and artists from the Niagara Region as well as Canadian or international contexts. Fields covered include creative practices taught and researched at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts as well as creative writing. Join us for the launch of the 2023-2024 Small Walker Press series, Blurs and Vagueness, featuring two new publications: Midnight Deer Abstractions (Geoff Farnsworth / Erin Knight) and A Glossary of Illegibility (Linda Carreiro / Lan “Florence” Yee). Geoff Farnsworth and Lan “Florence” Yee were guests of the 23-24 Walker Cultural Leaders series.