Midnight Deer Abstractions
Geoff Farnsworth and Erin Knight
Edited by Catherine Parayre and Nicholas Hauck
St. Catharines, ON / Vienna, Austria: Small Walker Press / Salon für Kunstbuch, 2024.
Graphic design by Bernhard Cella
ISBN 978-1-990208-34-8
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, Knight and 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. Just as Knight’s poetry occupies a space between certainty and uncertainty, Farnsworth’s images play with presence and undecidability. Here is “an alphabet a kaleidoscope of brushstrokes / and blurs” that leaves us comfortably, colourfully, wrapped in a riddle: what is the difference between tangerine and clementine?
There will be a book launch at Someday Books in St. Catharines on Tuesday, Sept. 24th, 4-6pm for both 2024 publications, which includes A Glossary of Illegibility by Linda Carreiro and Lan "Florence" Yee. More information is available at https://brocku.ca/miwsfpa/stac/2024-swp-publications