Season One: Contours of Identity
When we started working on this project, one of the characteristics we kept emphasizing was that of place—be it the city, region, or biome that we are from. In many of our conversations, “Prairies” became the word—the catchall—for the complexity of the place we were trying to encapsulate. As the project progressed, we started to wonder what exactly we meant when we said “making art in the Prairies,” or, “in the West.” With that question in mind, we decided to focus our first season on the Contours of Identity—in this case Prairie identity, and all the other ways of describing the land west of Ontario and east of the Rocky Mountains. Over the next few months we will have conversations, produce writing, and think about how we begin to answer this question.
Artists in a Time of Nation-Building: Part Two
Expanding the Frame: An Interview with Deanna Bowen
Deanna and I have spoken numerous times about the role of artists in this moment of Canadian nation-building, working together to clarify our thinking on it. The discussion that follows is condensed from several conversations between December 2025 and February 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.
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