Randal Fedje, Me and the Ledge, 124/365 from 365 Self Portrait Project, 2009.

It takes skill to build an art career in a modest region, with a pragmatic population that frequently favours football and curling over gallery-going. But the new geography of art means that the local and the global are becoming less stable concepts. Curator Jeff Nye explores this in his essay for the catalogue of the Mind the Gap survey show of 29 Saskatchewan artists at the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina.

Tenacity, determination and marginalization turn out to be great fodder for creativity. Despite the cultural isolation, or maybe because of it, Saskatchewan’s art scene is vibrant, dynamic and diverse, and Mind the Gap reflects the province’s current storehouse of cultural capital in all its expansive splendour. Nye and co-curator Amanda Cachia have ambitiously mapped the territory and returned with a disparate range of talent.

The show, in photography, sculpture, collage, experimental music, carving, video and comic book art, reflects a fractured, individualistic talent base, perhaps because of regional isolation contributing to the unique vision and subjects chosen by each artist. But there are some common themes like anxiety, mortality and illness, social engagement, outsider art versus a Modern aesthetic, and alternative art forms like graffiti and tattoo culture.

In the case of Regina artist Randal Fedje’s self-portrait series, “365 Self Portrait Project,” the artist took a fresh portrait of himself every day. The series of images, projected onto a big screen, shift as quickly as the tone and mood of the artist-subject. Fedje is portrayed poised in a wheat field, at a laundromat, seated near a window, drinking a fancy cocktail, with fresh produce in hand and naked in a Jesus-embossed towel.

Amalie Atkins, Stitch from Scenes from a Secret World, 16mm film transferred to DVD, 2009.

Aboriginal artist Wally Dion’s “Sky Wheel” is comprised of an elegant green patchwork of recycled circuit boards, an insightful commentary on the self-imposed field grid and our scarred landscape. The Saskatoon artist also appeared in the recent Flatlanders group exhibition at the Mendel Art Gallery and is leading the way for a new generation of contemporary artists with his conceptually-based social engagement.

Saskatoon-based film-maker Amalie Atkins also showed in Flatlanders. Her series “Scenes from a Secret World” is Margaret Laurence meets the Mad Hatter in supersaturated reds and greens.

Behind a black curtain, “Other People’s Dreams” is an eerie dreamscape compiled by the Regina collective Turner Prize (Blair Fornwald, John Hampton and Jason Cawood). Their photos serve up the most challenging work in the show, with styles colliding in a mixed-bag aesthetic that’s charged with imaginative intensity and a surreal afterglow. It’s neither parochial nor sentimental.