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/

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.

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.

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).

Following the introduction of a new course in 2024, STAC 3P97 Publishing: Creative Elements and Editorial Process, this exhibition is the first evidence of creative inquiry and expression in small press publishing. Students will create mini books, both material and digital. The reference volume is Touch, published by the SWP in 2023, which the students will creatively reformulate into new expressions of self-publishing.