Thank you for this opportunity.
I am the artistic director of PAVED Arts, an acronym for photography, audio, video, electronic and digital, an artist-run media arts centre located on Treaty 6 territory in Saskatoon. We serve a local community of artists, writers, curators and interested public, but the greater question of our purpose requires some unpacking. At the level of community, on a grassroots register, we work to democratize and demystify various media as tools of artistic expression. Democratizing gives access. Demystifying gives permission.
We democratize by wearing down barriers of access. Unlike a commercial model that must prioritize a profitable return on investment, we receive public funding that enables us to subsidize the equipment and facilities that we offer, making them as open and available to our community as possible. PAVED Arts brings artists from across the country to stage exhibitions and delivers educational workshops, which we offer free to our members. We keep membership rates low and waive fees where cost is a barrier. As with many artist-run centres in Canada, PAVED Arts proactively involves marginalized and equity-seeking artists, and we advocate for decolonization undertaken in good faith.
We demystify by placing the tools of production into the hands of people. What dominates artistic expression as delivered in Cineplexes or on television is largely shaped by market-driven imperatives, which are opaque by nature and, at its limit, focus-group determined. More fundamentally, the culture industry as such presupposes an anonymous consumer. There is no living relation between Hollywood and the local community.
By profound contrast, when a member in our community picks up a video camera for the first time, the effect is instantaneous. The physical engagement with the tools of production is itself a motor for ideas. Consequently, we discover our voice in the act of making. By engaging our programs, artists gain insight into the construction of media and begin to grapple with its implications. The issue is not simply access to equipment but the difference made when an artist retains full creative control of their expression.
Surely we are all familiar with the studies on the economic impact of the arts and the outsized value of each dollar invested in this sector. Such reckoning is persuasive and speaks the language of economists, politicians and many constituents, yet the real value of creative and performance spaces across Canada is not always so tangible. These spaces serve the social and civic health of our communities. For example, a recent Hill Strategies report funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage and the Ontario Arts Council found strong statistical connections between arts participation and public health. This is not to suggest that art is medicine; it is to say that people need more than passive consumption. People need spaces to gather, learn, experiment and speak back to the images and sounds that shape public life.
We protect creative and performance spaces because communities need the capacity to produce something strange and peculiar, something idiosyncratic, something that comes from this artist in this place, at this time. Along 20th Street in Saskatoon, on Treaty 6 territory, this kind of singular, artist-controlled work is being made every day. The people who keep these spaces running do so on goodwill, passion and chronically insufficient wages. The sector functions because of an enormous devotion that can never be fully honoured by public investment.
Imagine what becomes possible when organizations plan across years rather than scramble through grant cycles, retain experienced staff, deepen community relationships and speak back to the social challenges of our time. In a period of accelerating commercial enclosure of culture, where algorithms too often determine what gets seen, the capacity to produce something independent, artist-controlled and expressive of community is not ornamental. It may be exactly what holds us together.
Thank you.