Art Metropole

05 Apr. 2025

Small Walker Press Book Launch: A Glossary of Illegibility, Midnight Deer Abstractions, and Latitudes

Time

1:00-3:00 PM

Join us for the book launch of the three most recent publications from Small Walker Press, A Glossary of Illegibility, by Linda Carreiro and Lan “Florence” Yee; Midnight Deer Abstractions by Geoff Farnsworth and Erin Knight; and Latitudes by Derek Knight and Shawn Serfas. This event will feature a discussion between SWP editors Nicholas Hauck and Catherine Parayre and artists Linda Carreiro, Geoff Farnsworth, Derek Knight, and Lan “Florence” Yee.

In A Glossary of Illegibility, Linda Carreiro and Lan “Florence” Yee refute the notion that what cannot be apprehended is worthless. Their glossary may be read as a manifesto encouraging us to pay more attention to the blurs and vagueness of our environments and thoughts, and to our societies’ invisibilities – prompting us to open our creative minds and welcome uncertainties and the unknown with generosity.

Midnight Deer Abstractions is about limitless in-betweens, vast spaces where slight variations contain all the precisions of colour and diction, rendered immediately nebulous. Poetry and painting provide sanctuary where layers of selves are layered with memory and dream, which are in turn layered with creative process. As poet and painter, Erin Knight and Geoff Farnsworth are attuned to each other’s practice and the spectral selves their processes create. They invite us to think, read, and look “between foreground and background” for the traces and sketches of identities, whose edits are vague, always disappearing to be retraced, resketched.

Latitudes compiles fragments of existing texts (art criticism, fiction, personal reflections, email messages provided by Derek Knight) and images (details of sculptural paintings by Shawn Serfas). Put together, they suggest the raw outline of an imaginary novel. Latitudes exemplifies the playful extent to which an editor may exercise their freedom – choosing excerpts from unrelated texts, arranging them in no order other than one fictive thread identified by chance, picking details from large paintings without contextualizing their genesis or significance in the artist’s work.