Prairie Scene

The largest gathering of Manitoba and Saskatchewan artists ever presented outside the Prairies!

April 26 to May 8, 2011

For BC Scene in 2009, over 1,000 SWARMers took over the capital, invading galleries, boarding SWARM buses, and giving new meaning to the term “culture vultures” – SWARM 2011 brings the buzz back in style!

SWARM is:

  • a gallery-crawl
  • visual arts, dance, music, film, and performance art
  • a party, a celebration

1. Gallery Crawl

18:00 – 21:00
  • Start your crawl at your favourite gallery or at the NAC
  • Board the SWARM bus, walk, bike, run... SWARM your way, at your own pace
  • SWARM as many galleries as you can
  • Firestone Gallery 2 Daly
  • Gallery 101 301 1⁄2 Bank, Unit́ 1
  • Karsh-Masson Gallery 136 St. Patrick
  • National Arts Centre, Main Lobby & Mezzanine 53 Elgin
  • National Gallery of Canada 380 Sussex
  • Ottawa Art Gallery 2 Daly
  • SAW Gallery 67 Nicholas
  • Artengine 2 Daly
  • Snapdragon Gallery 791 Bank
  • Winter Kept Us Warm 2 Daly

View SWARM in a larger map

2. Opening Night Party

21:00 – 23:00 NAC MAIN LOBBY

Adrian Stimson

Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers

Random Acts of Dance

Canada’s oldest modern dance company has been creating and inciting great works of dance since 1964. For Prairie Scene, the company’s five superb dancers commit Random Acts of Dance...

Adrian Stimson

Adrian Stimson

Buffalo Boy Blackout Bingo

Celebrated widely, including at Burning Man where he is a longtime fixture, and inspired by Buffalo Bill’s “living pictures” of frontier life, performance artist Adrian Stimson has created an exciting new work invoking his fabulous and fictitious persona, “Buffalo Boy.” A free spirit who shifts in and out of identities, abandoning fixed meaning in favour of play, indeterminacy and ambiguity, “Buffalo Boy” is witty, outrageous, and provocative. Blackout Bingo is a response/reaction to Edward Poitras’ 1885 (on display in the NAC Lobby as part of the Canada Council Art Bank collection for Prairie Scene), an indictment of the residential school system and of environmental degradation, on which the words “The Amazon is burning... while you play bingo” are written.

Adrian Stimson

Adrian Stimson

Re-Herd

4,000 hydro-stone bison beckon you and your inner artist. Prairie Scene artist-in-residence Adrian Stimson invites you to join him in a symbolic repopulation of the decimated bison herds of the plains, so invoke your creative flair and paint a bison.

Adrian Stimson

I Heart Regina

Heard of Paris, je t’aime, and New York, I Love You? Prairie Scene and SWARM bring you the next, great single-city anthology film I Heart Regina. Paris and New York have been visited by millions of tourists and have been the settings for hundreds of films, while Regina has been in the realm of the uncharted, the unknown, and dare we say... the unfathomable? Until now.

Adrian Stimson

Robin Poitras

Tarantella/bell songs

Tarantella/bell songs is created and performed by Regina-based dancer/choreographer Robin Poitras, inspired by Louise Bourgeois’ monumental bronze spider, Maman.

The Abzurbs

(Ryan Ahoff, Lancelot Coar, William Eakin, Cliff Eyland, Tannis Kohut, Dominique Rey, Vanessa Rigaux) The Abzurbs is a performance group of Winnipeg artists who think fondly of Fluxus, Dada, Situationist and other performance art forms as they play, but they also make objects, including photographs, paintings, drawings, installations, sculptures, videos, and works in multimedia and design.

3. After-Party

SAW GALLERY 67 NICHOLAS

23:00 – 02:00

Dance, schmooze and keep the SWARM buzz going in the funky, below-street-level gallery spaces at SAW.