A second curatorial project by the Small City Art Museums curatorial collective, Biennial SCAM is the result of a Prairie-wide call to artists for proposals. As was the case with Viewing Distance - the first curatorial initiative in 2001, which was limited to Saskatchewan - there was a massive response. From the 100 proposals, a selection of ten was made, with an eye to presenting a set of works with a series of internal links, each critically engaged with its chosen media, each presenting a different view of the forces driving contemporary art practices in the Prairies.

John Noestheden invokes the music of the spheres with his interpretation of the astronomical charts depicting the star grouping of Ursa Major in an elegant arrangement of sleek steel wall pieces; this dance of beauty and control is conducted with less restraint but equal glamour in Suzanne Frank’s Glimmer, which poses a tantalizing spectacle of space travel embodied and refuted in a draped rocket ensemble composed of steel grommets. The body weighted finds an echo in Tammi Campbell’s softly painful, paintings of bruised skin, layered depictions of temporality and physical memory. In Wendy Peart’s Stain and Growth & Accumulation, the abject body is subject also to the whims of humour and the vagaries of fluids, with possibly embarrassing polka dot stains decorating shower curtain trousers and sludgy accumulations festooning sink plug chains.

A ‘pathetic aesthetic’ continues within the fastidious hand beading and shabby machine stitching of Anna Scott’s Local Heroes, wherein not-so-helpful pieces of advice are presented on myriad colourful and cheerfully disarming cushions. Val Cullen’s Strut II likewise effects a push-pull dynamic, with its array of glittering, richly hued organisms upon closer view revealing their dangerously sharp, jagged broken glass origins.

Lynn Richardson’s kinetic pieces Friendly Beavers are literally push-pull, an invitation to manipulation on the part of the viewer which implicates him/her - albeit playfully - in the desecration of the natural world brought on by daily human consumption. The natural world evoked in Theo Sims’ Footnotes to the Everyday is perhaps more accurately described as a diaspora; feral pigeon colonies, on the peripheries of human civilization, for Sims provide an opportunity to displace the banalities of the every day into an arena which invites contemplation.

Quotidian, but by no means banal, are the 105 paintings produced by Jeff Nachtigall at a two-week Emma Lake workshop in August of 2001. Aiming for ten paintings per day, Nachtigall incorporated a daily pastiche of events and ideas into his loose and colourful Emma Lake Sketchbook. Meanwhile, self expression is problematized in Myron Turner’s woodcuts based on highly magnified digital imagery; the touch of the personal implied by the woodcutting is checkmated by the abstraction of the computer-based forms.

Wonderful diverse but subtly linked, the works in Biennial SCAM provide an intriguing snapshot of the richness of contemporary art practice on the Prairies.

Joanne Marion, Medicine Hat Museum & Art Gallery