SEP 19: SYLVIA NICKERSON “CREATION” BOOK LAUNCH & GALLERY SHOW!

On Thursday, September 19th we are thrilled to be welcoming creator SYLVIA NICKERSON to The Beguiling to help celebrate the release of her new graphic novel CREATION from DRAWN & QUARTERLY!

Sylvia will talk about her work in conversation with ASMAA MALIK, graduate program director at Ryerson school of journalism and former managing editor of the Montreal Gazette! There’ll also be a chance to ask questions and get your book signed afterwards!

As if that wasn’t enough, Sylvia will also have a display of her original work that month in our gallery space to coincide with this event!

Everything kicks off at 7PM on Thursday, September 19th– this one means a lot to us as Sylvia has been a creator whose work we have been a fan of since for a long time, so it feels really special to be able to celebrate the release of her book from D&Q!

Thanks to Sylvia, Asmaa and Drawn & Quarterly, and thanks to YOU too! We’ll see you there!

ABOUT CREATION:

NEW LIFE AND OPPORTUNITIES ARISE FROM THE WRECKAGE OF A NORTH AMERICAN CITY URBAN RENEWAL AT WHAT COST?

A new mother takes us on a tour of Hamilton, a Rust Belt city born of the Industrial Revolution and dying a slow death due to globalization. This mother represents the city’s next wave of inhabitants—the artists and young parents who swarm a run-down area for its affordability, inevitably reshaping the neighborhoods they take over. Creation looks at gentrification from the inside out—an artist mother making a home and neighborhood for her family, struggling to find her place amid the existing and emerging communities.

While pushing her child’s stroller around Hamilton, Nickerson shows us the warehouse filled with open barrels of toxic sludge, the parking lot where the city’s homeless population sleeps, and the refurbished Victorian house (complete with elegant chandeliers) that is now a state-of-the-art yoga studio. Creation presents the city as a living thing—a place where many small lives intersect and where death, motherhood, pollution, poverty, and violence are all interconnected.

Drawn in evocative watercolor, Creation is unafraid to leave questions open-ended as Nickerson wanders the city and ponders just where the personal and political intersect, and where they ought to intersect.

PRAISE FOR CREATION:

Way back in the Stone Age, when I first began making comic books for adults, it was with hopes that books like this would follow. Sylvia Nickerson’s Creation is filled with the deep, complicated, messy stuff of real life—hard, sad, funny, insightful, and very rich in empathy. Seth, author of Clyde Fans

Creation is an ambitious work that thoughtfully explores themes of gentrification and one’s complicity therein and also talks frankly about the difficulty of making art after having children, all in Sylvia Nickerson’s unique and vibrant comic art style. Joe Ollmann, The Abominable Mr. Seabrook

Nickerson allows the profoundly personal to be completely universal in her stark, soft drawings and faceless figures. This is a deeply human, generous book. Eleanor Davis, The Hard Tomorrow