Beginning of The End--End of The Beginning: Saskatchewan's Offer of A Province-Wide International Art Project.

Saskatchewan. One third of the "prairie pass over" zone buttressed by boom and bust Alberta and frigidly quirky Manitoba, Saskatchewan is located dead in the centre of Canada. With a population of just under one million spread thinly over almost 600,000 square kilometres, limitless open space and the always present horizon are often the only company one keeps in the land of living skies. The province's isolationist tendency brews up nuggets of community with a large and vocal First Nations population; perhaps not unrelated, Saskatchewan is the birthplace of Medicare and the New Democratic Party. Culture-wise, Saskatchewan was home to the first artist-run centre for photography, created the first arts board in Canada and, of course, hosted the famed Emma Lake workshops in the 50s. Attended by such notables as Clement Greenberg, Anthony Caro and Barnett Newman, the workshops live on today as an extension of the University of Saskatchewan. Building on its legacy of resilience, key members of Saskatchewan's arts scene are devising a large-scale project that seeks to resolve every facet of the Saskatchewan identity and launch it onto the international sphere.

Entitled Beginning of the End--End of the Beginning, the massive project will take place in Saskatchewan's three largest cities as well as rural sites throughout the province. The brainchild of Felipe Diaz, executive director of the Saskatchewan Filmpool Co-operative, and interdisciplinary artist Kim Morgan, the project stems from their graduate days at the University of Regina. One result of their seminal conference Crossing Over: Negotiating Specialization in an Interdisciplinary Culture (2002) was the realization that major gaps existed in the construction and maintenance of Saskatchewan's cultural community. Saskatchewan's isolation from the rest of Canada's cultural scene was one thing to overcome, but isolation of communities and disciplines within the province was also blatantly apparent. Up to now, the province has mounted few interdisciplinary and multi-organizational events. Fueled by the conference, Diaz and Morgan took on the task of creating a project that would break down Saskatchewan's ingrained tendencies and help to launch a pan-arts community within Saskatchewan.

Staying true to the co-operative spirit of the province, Diaz and Morgan formed a curatorial collective consisting of academic and independent curator Elizabeth Matheson, director and curator of the Art Gallery of Prince Albert, Brenda Barry Byrne and interdisciplinary artist and curator, Adrian Stimson. As the first-ever international project funded by the Saskatchewan Arts Board, there are high hopes and even higher obstacles for the event, projected to take place August-October 2010. Although skeptics may balk at the idea of an international art project happening in the midst of the province's characteristic emptiness, the curatorial collective is more than aware of Saskatchewan's marginalized identity--and they plan on using it to their full advantage.

From her home in Saskatoon, Matheson explains that Beginning of the End--End of the Beginning will not just be another international exhibit in the vein of the biennalle, but a sustainable project for Saskatchewan that is being offered to the global art scene. Speaking about representing Saskatchewan and Canada on the international level, Matheson says matter-of-factly, "Canada is not known for any contemporary Canadian art scene. International artists don't see Saskatchewan as marginalized in Canada, but simply a part of Canada. I remember attending a seminar in Silo Paulo in which most of the artists and curators from various countries meeting there were not familiar with Canadian contemporary art, let alone defined in terms of specific regions. This experience led me to think about what happens when particular national art scenes, when left to focus on themselves for too long, end up defending geo political positions they took up years ago. Delving into these types of issues may be an opportunity to bring forward new ideas and envisage other ways for contemporary art to unfold other than by separateness and regionalism."

Essentially, the curators plan on bringing contemporary Saskatchewan out of seclusion by framing it against a contemporary international community that does not root itself in regionalism, but transnationalism. To many, Canada is a country to be explored--and on an international scale, the micro-macro relationship of Saskatchewan to Canada holds more truth than may be commonly thought. With such a small population, Saskatchewan lacks the sheer numbers to stimulate a highly active internal art scene; sparsely populated, it faces the constant threat of brain drain. The same can be said for Canada in relation to the world. Like Canada, Saskatchewan is also perceived by outsiders to be more a land of resources than cultural production. Diaz, who remained in Regina after graduate studies, believes in the importance of creating a sense of direction and purpose for the arts community--and consequently changing the way Saskatchewanians perceive themselves.

"Art does not seem to be a priority for many people in our province," Diaz declares. "It is seen as a luxury that distracts from the necessary goals of survival, but art is not a luxury, art is not a distraction: it is a necessary part of our survival and identification as a positive, forward-moving community. Maybe this has something to do with our Depression-era ethics, maybe it has something to do with our 'homesteader' thinking, or maybe that wide-open horizon makes us more cautious because we can see things coming from far away. Whatever the reason, the implication is that art does not enter the psyche of Saskatchewan people, except as an imposition on the real work that needs to be done."

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At the present moment, Beginning of the End--End of the Beginning remains in a research and community-outreach phase. The plan is to invite 40-60 national and international artists to come to Saskatchewan to partake in residencies and the mounting of large-scale public works. Undeniably, there would be immense appeal for an artist from a densely populated city such as Mexico City or Mumbai to come to the Canadian Prairies and be given an entire ghost town, stretches of highway or an abandoned hospital to mould at his or her whim. The promise of grandeur in site-specific public projects and the event's location away from a major urban centre echo the Munster Sculpture Project, which occurs once every 10 years. The curatorial collective also aims to have a positive effect on Saskatchewan s arts community by offering working residencies between the international artists and local artists.

Stimson, perhaps the most widely known member of the curatorial collective (for his famed performance character Buffalo Boy [2004-ongoing], a mock reference to the historical Buffalo Bill who wrestles with dualities of colonialism and sexuality), thinks of the project as experimental: "While we have an idea of how we as a collective see the project, it will expand as the project evolves, leaving many opportunities to be realized," he says. "The theme, Beginning of the End--End of the Beginning creates a space for the unknown and transition. Perhaps we in Saskatchewan are ready to explore these spaces. Saskatchewan is a little quirky, in a good way, meaning that its isolation has created a unique space where the social meets the realities of reliance, reliance on each other for survival. This project could create new templates for curatorial collaboration."

Byrne, the last to come on board and representing northern Saskatchewan, is also one of the founding members of the seam (Small City Art Museum) collective. Bringing that grassroots mentality to the curatorial mix, she refers to how SCAM members pool resources and raise the profile of their institutions through dissemination and advocacy. SCAM consists of six curators from across Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia, all from similar-size institutions serving regional populations. Byrne describes the projects curatorial collective as a new hybrid, fostering new ideas, breaking the paradigms of curation and discourse, but ultimately she says, "Beginning of the End--End of the Beginning is not just about exhibits of art and art practices, but the spirit of the province, uniting land and people."

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As a project that has the potential to critically contextualize the work of Saskatchewan arts centres and Saskatchewan artists on an international stage, the liminality suggested by the idea of the beginning and the end promises to play itself out on the massive extension of highways and dirt roads found throughout the province. Travel, specifically driving across the land, will be a huge part of the project, stretching out to the never-ending horizon that is so defining to the experience of Saskatchewan. The feeling of moving across the province will be as important a context as the works themselves. The muse of the project is this experience of openness, one that combines sensations of freedom and fear, comparable only to finding oneself in the middle of the ocean, inspired by a landscape unlike any other in the world. Even the title, Beginning of The End--End of the Beginning, connotes a continual flatness that is at once hypnotizing and enticing.

Morgan, who has lived in many major urban centres in different countries, says that she returned simply because she grew up here. "There is something about Saskatchewan that stays with you, wherever you are," says Morgan, whose current research focuses on new-genre public art. However, under a newly elected provincial government that does not yet have an arts policy--yet alone a public arts policy--she points to the writer Carol Becker, who was the keynote speaker at the Crossing Over conference in 2002, and who was recently appointed dean of arts at Columbia University. A major point of reference for the curatorial collective are Becket's theories on interdisciplinary practice, the artist as public intellectual, the artist as catalyst and the desire to bring different people together to create dynamic environments or multidimensional public spaces--all ideas the collective hopes to expand upon and activate.

Banking on the diversity of voices and backgrounds to develop a deeper investigatory approach to curation, Matheson, in particular, does not believe that the contemporary art created for this project will be relevant only to Saskatchewan, but has the potential to take on the complex issues of transnationalism and regionalism using Saskatchewan as a meeting ground where artists can locate themselves. Creating affinities between people, land and art, and using geographical vastness to situate new spatial exhibition narratives, the project makes the most of what already exists and invites the world to re-imagine the province with them.

Saskatchewan's top economic sectors are agriculture, oil and gas and mining, including the world's largest industries for potash and uranium. Promoting itself as a province of affordable real estate, world-class spas with the lowest green fees for avid golfers, Saskatchewan's cultural city has consistently ranked low in the nation. Whether this province will be a destination spot for arts professionals remains to be seen, but what is evident is that Saskatchewan currently lacks the infrastructure for tourism at the international level. Funding from corporate and Crown companies (which are still actually owned by the Crown) will be essential to the project along with independent and private sources for a multitier and sustainable investment.

Funding is a factor for any arts initiative today, and Diaz notes that it has become a part of their programming: "If our programming is about developing community, then we should consider that actively seeking funding from the community can be a part of its development. We must start to develop a community of sponsors and donors in our province, and we are developing this program as an opportunity for business interests to invest in the cultural industry."

Amy Fung writes on the prairie arts scene from Edmonton, Alberta. Most of her writings can be found on Post-it notes, www.prairieartsters.com and in quality national magazines.