Articles tagged with: Walker Cultural Leader

  • Small Walker Press at Art Metropole, Sat. Oct. 7, 2023

    Photo credits: Annette le Fort; Bernhard Cella

    The Small Walker Press (SWP) was hosted by Art Metropole in Toronto for the launch of the 2023 volumes Touch, and Tender Readings. Books As Archives, and Handmade.  The editors of the SWP, Catherine Parayre and Nicholas Hauck, of the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures and the Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture (STAC) of the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts, and David Vivian of the Department of Dramatic Arts, the Director of STAC, were joined by the creators of Handmade, Seth Weiner and Bernhard Cella, via zoom from Vienna, Austria.  In the audience were members of the Toronto Experimental Translation Collective Collective, among others.

    The SWP thanks Sara Maston, Communications & Data Coordinator for Art Metropole, Blair Swann, Associate Director, and Arshdeep Kang, Programs, Publications & Shop Assistant, for their generous hospitality.

    For the 2023 series Books and Archives, four book designers published their reflections on archives.

    Two artists – Brandon LaBelle and Annette le Fort – visit their local public library, check out a few books, keep these for a few days then return them. The text and black-and-white photographs included in Touch, and Tender Readings. Books As Archives document this trip to the library. They evoke a sensory experience – tactile, visual, and olfactive – and a meditative performance – walking through the stacks, touching book covers, turning the pages of a book. LaBelle and le Fort present the library as an organic space and the destination of an intellectual and sensuous journey during which thoughts expand quickly beyond the books displayed on the shelves.

    Handmade is the product of a reflection between two artists whose practice includes book design and curatorial projects.
    For Handmade, Bernhard Cella and Seth Weiner wrote together short creative-writing pieces. Each is the facetious description of contents in an imaginary book. They then used these descriptions to generate images of book covers through AI. The images look like photographs of books, although none of these books (none of these covers) actually exists. The book descriptions refer to content that was never written. The result is a catalogue of books that do not exist. Handmade points to the importance of book design and marketing (book descriptions, catalogues).

    Parayre and Hauck also presented the online volume (Im)mobilités, and the many other notable volumes of the Small Walker Press, including Possible Grounds. Redrawing Relations in Toronto, Beneath a Velvet Moon. Early Love Poems and Tewaaraton. La crosse / Lacrosse, seen here on a shelf celebrating indigenous art and artists at Art Metropole.

    Join us for the next SWP event on Thursday Oct. 19 from 2 to 4 p.m. in the Commons of the Brock Library, for another Small Walker Press book launch for Books and Archives, presented by the Centre for Studies in Arts & Culture and the Walker Cultural Leader Series.

     


    Small Walker Press book launch: Books and Archives
    Presented by the Centre for Studies in Arts & Culture and  Walker Cultural Leader Series

    Saturday, Oct. 7 from 2 to 3 p.m.
    Art Metropole, Toronto, https://artmetropole.com/
    896 College Street, Toronto, ON M6H 1A4 +1 416-703-4400

    OUR NEXT EVENT:

    Small Walker Press book launch:
    Books and Archives
    Presented by the Centre for Studies in Arts & Culture and  Walker Cultural Leader Series

    Thursday, Oct. 19 from 2 to 4 p.m.
    Brock Library, Learning Commons

    Free event, open to the public

    Small Walker Press Catalogue Fall 2023

    Small Walker Press Book Launch two-pager Fall 2023

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    Categories: Announcements, Events, Faculty & Instructors, In the Media, Media Releases, News, Uncategorised

  • Donna Szőke presents ‘On Invisibility’, January 21 at the MIWSFPA

    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

    download the poster

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    Categories: Announcements, Events, Faculty & Instructors, Media Releases, News, Uncategorised