On 21 January, the Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture welcomes artist Donna Szőke, Chair of the Department of Visual Arts and a member of the recently created Research Centre in Interdisciplinary Arts and Creative Culture, as a Walker Cultural leader for 2020.
Szőke will present an artists’ talk “On Invisibility” at 7:00 pm at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts of Brock University (MIWSFPA). This is a free community event and everyone is welcome to attend.
Invisibility is this year’s theme at The Small Walker Press, a small press valuing interdisciplinary cooperation and the exploration of image and text, homed in the Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture (STAC) at the MIWSFPA.
Szőke creates expanded animation, media art, video, drawing, and collaborations. She investigates immanence, embodied perception, and the fluidity of lived experience.
In her artist’s talk, she will present her work and her current book project The Dark Redacted in cooperation with author Gary Barwin, to be published in April 2020 by the Small Walker Press.
In an excerpt from the forthcoming volume, editors Catherine Parayre and Derek Knight write:
Donna Szőke thoughtfully investigates the fluidity of meaning and presence. Rather than elucidating a concept or an experience, she proposes a semi-abstract perusal of collective or intimate issues. Offering a reflection on the evocative instability of the biographical and the personal, and opting for an approach close to autofiction, her work constellates subtle possibilities and its scope defies the limitations of certainty. The artist is a compelling storyteller for whom the quest for meaning and the vagrancies of that search are more significant than plain facts. For The Dark Redacted Szőke proposes traces of a fragile story and never-faltering endurance. Her sequence of images alternates beautifully detailed natural life – a buffalo, intricate vegetation – and minimally sketched-out human presence and personal objects. As a result, her work addresses the viewers’ intuition and sensitivity to the environment.
The event is presented by the Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture for the Walker Cultural Leader Series, generously founded by Marilyn I. Walker. The Walker Cultural Leader series brings leading artists, performers, practitioners and academics to the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts at Brock University. Engaging, lively and erudite, these sessions celebrate professional achievement, artistic endeavour and the indelible role of culture in our society.
Please join us.Join us on January 21, 2020 at 7-8:30 pm. The presentation takes place in the Art & Val Fleming Smart Classroom (MWS 156), located on the lower level of the MIWSFPA. Limited parking is available at the MIWSFPA, with additional parking nearby at the Garden Park/Carlisle Street Parking garage and adjacent lots.
Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture: Walker Cultural Leader Artist’s talk
‘On Invisibility’, with Donna Szőke
21 January 2020, 7-8:30 pm, MWS 156
Horacio Fernández first wrote Fotografía Pública (MNCARS, 1999), the first landmark book to position the scholarship of books and magazines as a topic of critical importance to the photographic medium, “book about books” has become a genre of publishing unto itself. Each year, the PhotoBook Awards jury sees at least one well-researched, richly illustrated publication that presents some new facet of photobibliophilia—often using the filter of a particular region or city or even a particular thematic niche. This year, however, the jury noted a rise in the number of books about books that exceeded expectation in terms of design, like Printed Photography in Venezuela; or ventured into new territory, telling the story of a single notable magazine, like Camera Austria International: Laboratory for Photography and Theory. Each of these volumes, in its own way, adds additional detail and texture to the evolving connoisseurship and scholarship dedicated to the photobook.” (from 
