D+Q Double Launch! Adrian Norvid and Sylvia Nickerson
Join us as we welcome into the world Adrian Norvid’s Fake Lake and Sylvia Nickerson’s Creation!
FAKE LAKE:
The town of Fake Lake is a sludge pit of goings on and the Fake Lake Bottom Feeder (the local paper) has been kept busy chronicling what amounts to a mild apocalypse – collapsing bridges, a gap in the street that swallows the high school band, an awful bacterial business at the hot springs and a great blowout at the Fakeola bottling plant. Seeing souls ripe for the picking, Lucifer (ever a prominent presence in Fake Lake) has even taken out a paid advertising supplement – Writhing Bodies Herbal Tea Mix anyone?
The Fake Lake Bottom Feeder is a replica of a weekly edition in May complete with Children’s Section (try not to freak out Trippy the clown), Industrial News (it’s work injury week, again), a fulsome Food Section (beware the Flakey Bakery’s Sticky Buns) and a special double page spread of the Dregs Coffee Shop’s Sponsored Expedition to Ascend Old Frothy (their espresso machine) with exclusive photos of bearded hipster explorer types hip deep in milk foam. Fake Lake! There’s a seat for you in the Polished By Bums Tavern and it looks like someone’s signed you up for the Midnight Churchyard Dig…
Adrian Norvid, born in London, England, currently lives and works in Montreal. His large-format drawing centers around popular imagery, vernacular and kitsch with sources ranging from Psychedelia to Georgian era illustration. He teaches painting and drawing at Concordia.
CREATION:
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.
Sylvia Nickerson is a comics artist, writer, and illustrator who lives in Hamilton, Canada. Her focus is storytelling in community arts and writing comics examining parenthood, gender identity, social class and religion. Her illustrations have appeared in The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post and her comics have been nominated for a Doug Wright Award.