The Small Walker Press

Book Launch
Bernhard Cella in conversation with Derek Knight and Catherine Parayre

Small Walker Press
Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture
Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts
Brock University / Niagara Region / Canada

The Small Walker Press is predicated on and values interdisciplinary cooperation and the exploration of image and text. It seeks to contribute to and participate in the promotion of book culture.

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

Shawn Serfas’ 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. Derek Knight’s essay presents a fine analysis and eloquent contextualization of the paintings represented in the publication. In his creative-writing response to Serfas’ work, Richard Fausset, who was affected by the passage of Hurricane Katrina over New Orleans and its surroundings in 2005, 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.

Dickinson, Adam and Lorène Bourgeois. The Quarry. Graphic design by Bernhard Cella. St. Catharines, ON / Vienna, Austria: Small Walker Press / Salon für Kunstbuch, 2019. ISBN 978-1-9990860-1-5

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. As a result of their walk together, Dickinson contributes a poem about childhood reminiscences and the dreamy yet familiar realm where they belong, while 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.

Catherine Parayre
Catherine Parayre is the author of eight books and the editor of Voix plurielles, the peer-reviewed journal of the Association of Professors of French at Canadian Universities and Colleges (APFUCC). Her most recent stand-alone publication discusses contemporary art exhibited at the Rodman Hall Art Centre in the Region of Niagara. In 2017 she co-curated the exhibition “Post-Industrial Ephemera: Soundings, Gestures, Poetics” in Silo City, Buffalo, USA. She also produces the radio series “Tic-tac: poétiques et portraits avec Clamenç Prades” on CFBU 103.7 FM (Kanada) and contributes regularly to Freirad Radio, Innsbruck. Parayre is the Director of the Centre for Studies in Arts and Cultures, Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts, as well as a faculty member in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Brock University, St. Catharines, Canada.

Derek Knight
Derek Knight has been on faculty in the Department of Visual Arts at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, since 1985. Educated at Croydon College of Art, London, England, Carleton University, Ottawa, and State University of New York at Buffalo, he teaches courses in 20th century European and North American art history, contemporary art and theory, and contributes to the MA program in Studies in Comparative Literatures and Arts. Knight has developed a profile as an independent curator and was awarded the INCO prize for curatorial writing in support of his exhibition “N.E. Thing Co.: the Ubiquitous Concept” at Oakville Galleries in 1995. He has written catalogue essays, authored scholarly papers, and lectured extensively on contemporary art.