The Small Walker Press addresses the research and creative interests of faculty members at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts at Brock University, and engages with authors, artists and academics alike to produce small, innovative publications.

Inland

Shawn Serfas with creative writing by Richard Fausset and an essay by Derek Knight

Serfas, Shawn. Inland, with creative writing by Richard Fausset and an essay by Derek Knight.
St. Catharines, ON and Vienna, Austria: Small Walker Press and Salon für Kunstbuch, 2019.
42 pages, 16 illustrations
Graphic design by Bernhard Cella
ISBN 978-1-9990860-0-8
CAN $10 + tax

Shawn Serfas grew up exploring the northern reaches of Saskatchewan’s lakes and river systems.  Although initially drawn to an academic career in the environmental sciences, Serfas pursued Fine Arts and Art History degrees in Saskatchewan as well as a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Alberta. His interests include contemporary painting, drawing and printmaking practices. His work echoes a reflection on relational abstraction, environmental aesthetics, the landscape as well as issues bordering abstraction and representation. Serfas is profoundly aware of human intervention on natural resources and of its devastating consequences. His series Inland and Portrait of a Mark appeared in the 2016 exhibition Inland curated by Stuart Reid at the Rodman Hall Art Centre, Brock University, St. Catharines. Richard Fausset was affected by the passage of Hurricane Katrina over New Orleans, Louisiana and its surroundings in 2005. His piece of creative writing investigates how human life impacts nature in a bayou, and vice-versa. Serfas’ artworks and Fausset’s fictional narrative elicit a dialogue between north and south yet offer two distinct reflections on pollution and the insufficiently controlled use of the environment in North America.

Shawn Serfas’ most recent exhibitions include Grid Terrain, Gallery MX, Montreal, Quebec, Alloyed Prairie, Bugera Matheson Gallery, Edmonton, Alberta, Portrait of a Mark, SOPA Fine Arts Gallery, Kelowna, British Columbia in 2018; Pseudo-Fiction, (with Catherine Parayre), Alliance Francaise – Galerie Pierre Léon, Toronto, Ontario in 2017; Cleave and Trench, Bugera Matheson Gallery, Edmonton, Alberta in 2016; Dig, Machine Shop Gallery, Algoma University, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario in 2015; and Out of Sorts, (with William Griffiths), Sopa Fine Arts, Kelowna, British Columbia in 2014.

The Quarry

Adam Dickinson and Lorène Bourgeois.

Dickinson, Adam and Lorène Bourgeois. The Quarry.
St. Catharines, ON and Vienna, Austria: Small Walker Press and Salon für Kunstbuch, 2019.
39 pages, 19 illustrations
Graphic design by Bernhard Cella
ISBN 978-1-9990860-1-5
CAN $ 10 + tax

In the Fall of 2018, the Small Walker Press invited poet Adam Dickinson and artist Lorène Bourgeois to walk through a former landfill (1976-2001), the Glenridge Quarry Naturalization Site. Located on the Niagara Escarpment, overlooking the City of St. Catharines, Ontario, it functions today as a public recreation area. Its landscape still resembles a raw, industrialized version of nature, eerie and ominous in its windswept hills. The ground is punctuated by prickly vegetation providing beautiful flowers in the summer months, and rocks, from pebbles and gravel to larger boulders. A constructed landscape, it is perceived as rationally managed nature. Indeed, there is something decidedly unnatural about this carefully designed space where layers of clay and soil have been deposited and vegetation native to the area planted with the aim of naturalizing the landfill. Along the paths, visitors will also notice the small mechanical vents of a gas collection system from which escape acrid odours produced by decomposing waste under the harmonious scenery. As a result of their walk together, Adam Dickinson contributes a poem about childhood reminiscences and the dreamy yet familiar realm where they belong, while Lorène Bourgeois revisits some of her earlier drawings and presents them anew in a sequence whose rhythm is inspired by photographs she made of the Glenridge Quarry.

Adam Dickinson’s poetry focuses primarily on intersections between poetry and science as a way of exploring new ecocritical perspectives and alternative modes of poetic composition. He is the author of Cartography and Walking (2002), Kingdom, Phylum (2006), The Polymers (2013), and Anatomic (2018). Lorène Bourgeois’ recent works are large-scale representations of humans, animals, clothing and nakedness. She draws her sources from public archives and museum artefacts, as well as from her contact with the world around her. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally, and is held in numerous collections, including the Canada Council Art Bank, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto.

Small Walker Press publications can be purchased at the following locations:

Campus Store
Brock University, St. Catharines

The Salon für Kunstbuch
Vienna, Austria

Someday Books
St. Catharines, Ontario

Bruno
Venice, Italy

The Small Walker Press is homed in the Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts and receives the support of the Walker Cultural Leader series.

It publishes collaborative work that brings together authors and artists from the Niagara Region, as well as the Canadian or international contexts, covering all disciplines and creative practices taught and researched at the MIWSFPA