Leader & District Arts Council

Saskatchewan's award-winning banjo player, Eliza Doyle, wows global audiences with her charismatic performances, clawhammer banjo skills, and refined songwriting. After playing with The Dead South (earning a Juno in 2018), her career soared. Her latest album, "Pretty Strange," features 10 live tracks recorded in Nashville on May 4th, 2022. A 20-show US tour showcases her evolution as an artist, blending catchy melodies with alt-country/folk, infused with banjo, guitar, and pedal steel. Doyle's unique take on Americana keeps listeners engaged and excited.

The Wardens don’t just sing about the land, they’re part of it. The Rocky Mountain-based band’s stories and songs rise from the very land they’ve protected as Canadian national park wardens. With haunting three-part harmonies and chilling tales, the band’s mountain music - blending folk, roots and western styles " reflects Canada's protected wilderness areas. Celebrating the return of wild buffalo, wrangling grizzly bears, lonely nights on the packtrail and reflecting on an environment in crisis, a performance by The Wardens has been dubbed "the quintessential mountain-culture concert experience."

You might hear the tunes of the Misery Mountain Boys drifting from behind a rotating bookcase of a 1930’s speakeasy. Harkening back to a simpler time, the MMB’s music is infused with tongue in cheek wit, playfulness, and nostalgia. With a mix of catchy originals and contemporary songs reimagined in driving swing, the band’s performance delivers as both classic and fresh. The band offers a generous variety of sweaty jazz numbers, velvety love songs, and swingin' jump-blues, with plenty of lighthearted stories and laughs along the way.

Surface All The Way Through is an exhibition of textile and text-based signs assembled from discarded plastic using hobby-craft techniques. It is an exploration of superficiality, distraction, reflection, containment, emotional blockages, consumerism, accumulation, and waste. The objects in this show are fabricated entirely of plastic: a material that I am endlessly attracted to for its shape-shifting mimicry and limitless supply of exciting surface qualities. As a toxic, uncontainable, and grossly over-produced material, it is also repulsive and surrounds me with dread and despair. It is between opposites that I have created these objects: working to both deflect and deal with my own conflicting attitudes in a time of vast uncertainty, inexpressible emotions, and constant horror. All materials in the show were rescued from their fate as discarded objects, collected either from my own personal consumption habits (packaging waste) or from the thrift store (craft supplies, projects, decorations).

Atim Maskikhiy (‘Dog Medicine’ in Cree) presents works of seventeen artists local to the La Ronge tri-community area in Northern Saskatchewan. The multimedia pieces represent the artists’ interpretations of the dog-human relationship as expressed through preliminary findings of a community-driven research project conducted in the community. This unique marriage of art and science allows knowledge translation to a broader audience than typical of peer-reviewed research. Highlighting the need for improved access to animal health and welfare services in northern, remote and Indigenous communities everywhere, this gallery represents a call to action for systemic change at the human-dog interface. Through their works, the artists confirm that dog-human bonds are highly valued and often critical to human life and well-being in the north, and current approaches to ‘fixing’ dog problems in communities without regular access to care ignore important contributors at the root of the issue. This exhibition is curated by Dr. Jordan Woodsworth, Director, Northern Engagement and Community Outreach, Western College of Veterinary Medicine. The artists featured in this exhibition are: Andrea Cowan, Caron Dubnick, Donna Langhorne, Hilary Johnstone, John Halkett, Larissa Muirhead, Miriam Koerner, Molly Ratt, Myles Charles, Nancy Lafleur, Terri Franks, Sammi Kopeck, Abigail Clarke, Annalisa Heppner, Jade Roberts, Jasmine Grondin, and Wendy Cleveland.