For those who are unfamiliar with the Saskatoon art community, finding places to experience local art can be an intimidating experience. Luckily, one University of Saskatchewan student is acting as a tour guide for Saskatoon’s art galleries.

Tara Stadnyk, a third-year English honours student at the U of S, is currently a contributing writer for Art Passport YXE, a project that hopes to help visitors explore Saskatoon’s art galleries.

Art Passport YXE is run by PAVED Arts, a local non-profit organization that strives to further the development of photography, audio, visual, electronic and digital arts — hence the acronym. The project was originally the brainchild of PAVED’s technical director, Reilly Forbes.

“[Forbes] got the idea from, you know, the [Mendel Art Gallery] closing down, and the city started talking about ‘What are we going to do while we’re waiting for the Remai [Modern] Art Gallery? There’s no art galleries in the city,’” Stadnyk said. “And Reilly was like, ‘You guys are nuts,’ there are so many art galleries in this city. So this is how the project originated — through the Mendel shutting down and Reilly wanted to spread awareness on all the different galleries in the city.”

Visitors can pick up a passport at PAVED — located in Riversdale — and receive a stamp for each gallery they go to.

Through a career internship course in the English honours program, Stadnyk has been able to work as a blogger for this project. It’s her job to visit each of the 13 galleries in the passport and then write about it online. Her journals are different from the usual write-ups that one might read about an art gallery exhibit.

“I’ve been visiting these galleries and writing about them, and the coolest thing is that Reilly didn’t want just a journalistic feel. He wanted a very personal, raw sort of experiential account of going and visiting these places,” Stadnyk said.

Stadnyk seems to appreciate the freedom that the internship gives her.

“Each gallery to the next is so different, like I’m not just going and writing the same story on every place. It’s like every time I go, I can shape it to how I want. I can meet with the artists,” Stadnyk said. “The last piece I did, I was wearing my headphones and listening to heavy metal, and so the piece I wrote was all about how the art and the heavy metal fed off each other and the whole experience was really geared because of the music I was listening to.”

Art Passport YXE has brought Stadnyk all over the city, including several of the art galleries located on the U of S campus.

“I visited the [Gordon Snelgrove Gallery] and I met with the fine arts students [whose work is being displayed there] right now. That was really cool, because it was right during the February break and it was a huge blizzard that day, and we shut off all the lights and watched the light art installations that way,” Stadnyk said.

Although she is primarily a writer, Stadnyk appreciates art in all its forms, as she is also a musician and a performance artist. She hopes more projects will emerge for writers in Saskatoon like the one she has been offered through the career internship course.

“I’ve been really grappling with ‘Will I be able to do what I want — freelance writing — from Saskatoon, or do I have to go away?’ So that’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately. I would really like to see more opportunities for writers here in Saskatoon,” Stadnyk said.

Ultimately, the purpose of Art Passport YXE is to get people to enjoy local art in Saskatoon, something that Stadnyk seems happy to contribute to.

“There’s no incentive for doing this, like there’s no prizes at the end or anything, but it’s just about taking initiative and going to check out what’s happening in the city with art.”

For more information, visit artpassportYXE.com.

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Image: Jeremy Britz / Graphics Editor