“Poetics and Painting, an Evening of Words, Poems and Images” with Meeka Walsh, Barry Schwabsky and Robert Enright
Please join Pictura at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec for a very special evening:
“Poetics and Painting, an Evening of Words, Poems and Images” with Meeka Walsh, Barry Schwabsky and Robert Enright.
The evening opens with a reading from Meeka Walsh’s Malleable Forms (ARP Books), a selection of 47 of her award-winning essays on art and literature. In his introduction to the book, called “The Woman Who Watched a Stone Grow”, Barry Schwabsky draws our attention to her “beautiful accumulations” and their “explicit qualities of curiosity and generosity.”
Meeka’s reading will be followed by a wide-ranging interview about the current state of painting conducted by Robert Enright with critic and poet, Barry Schwabsky.
The presentation portion of the event will conclude with Barry’s readings from two new books, a collection of his poems called Water From Another Source (Spuyten Duyvil), and from Amelia Rosselli’s Sleep (NYR Books), for which he wrote the introduction.
Following the readings, both Meeka and Barry will be available for book signings.
All of the books from the reading will be available for purchase.
The readings and discussions will be conducted in English.
Tickets available here.
Meeka Walsh, a Winnipeg-based writer and curator, has been the editor of Border Crossings since 1992. The most recent issue of the magazine is a 228-page long investigation of painting. Malleable Forms, which Chris Kraus describes as “collapsing the boundaries between ‘criticism’ and the ‘personal essay’ are “stunning examples of how to look, how to feel, how to see.” Malleable Forms won the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction in 2023. She was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 2017.
Robert Enright is Research Professor in Art Theory and Criticism in the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph and the senior contributing editor to Border Crossings magazine. In its pages he has published 400 interviews with contemporary artists and filmmakers. In 2005 he was made a Member of the Order of Canada.
Barry Schwabsky is the art critic for The Nation and the International Reviews editor for ARTFORUM. Widely regarded as one of the most perceptive writers about painting, his introductions to Phaidon’s Vitamin P series and The Triumph of Painting are now considered canonical. Among his many books, are The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (Verso), The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (Sternberg) and Landscape Painting Now (D.A.P.), as well as five books of poetry. He is a contributing editor to Border Crossings where he writes “PictureLibrary”, a column on photography books.
