ART GALLERY OF REGINA

Gerald Jessop was born in Ponteix, Saskatchewan in 1947. He completed his B.F.A. Degree in Winnipeg, Manitoba and earned a Masters' of Fine Arts in Regina, Saskatchewan in 1977. He worked as a Community Artist in Weyburn, Saskatchewan for two years and as Supervisor of the Enriched Art Program for the Division of Continuing Education in Calgary, Alberta for three years. He also served as a Summer Session Lecturer in Art Education at the University of Calgary in 1975 and as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Regina in 1976 and 1977. From 1977 to 1989, he was the Director/Curator of the Moose Jaw Art Museum, and from 1989 to December 1994, he held the same position at the Kelowna Art Gallery. Throughout his career he was an active volunteer as a juror, an art advisor for government and board member, notably, Jessop sat on the City of Kelowna's Public Art Committee for the City and the Healing Arts executive for the Okanagan. In 2006, he moved to Buena Vista, SK, and in 2020 to Regina, SK, where he practices Tai Chi Chuan and pursues his lifelong career of art making.

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Terri Fidelak is an artist based on Treaty 4 Territory in Swift Current, Saskatchewan. Her work in sculpture, drawing, installation, and performance explores notions of attention, value, and interconnectivity. Collaboration is a staple of her creative practice. She has engaged in numerous community art initiatives over the years, including projects with the Dunlop Art Gallery and Common Weal Community Arts, as well as contributing as an artistic associate with Curtain Razors Theatre since 2016. Fidelak has participated in various artist residencies, such as Medalta International Artist Residency (AB), White Rabbit Arts (NS), MOTHRA (ON), and Signal Fire Arts (Oregon). Her work is among SK Arts’ Permanent Collection as well as private collections in Canada, the US, and Japan.

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Simon Fuh is an artist and writer based in Toronto, ON. He has a Master’s of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto, where he was awarded the Joseph Armand Bombardier SSHRC Scholarship. His diverse artistic practice is broadly interested in the unending tension between desire and lack, and how collaboration can reframe lack as the site of potential. Often taking the form of video and sound installation, his work incorporates themes of utopian imagination, parties, and memory. Recent exhibitions include Memory Theatre, 1 Spadina Cres. (Toronto, ON) places where sounds turn to dreams…, Hearth Gallery (Toronto, ON), Eternal Wish Radio, Forest City Gallery (London, ON), and Down the Rabbit Hole, 330g (Saskatoon, SK). Simon has published writing with C Magazine, Hearth Gallery, and Susan Hobbs Gallery, and will be publishing an artist book with Gravitron Press in 2022.

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A native of Japan, Shinobu Akimoto started life and art in Canada in the early 1990's and became known as a visual artist through national and international presentations of her "project-based" installations. She holds a BFA from the University of Victoria and an MFA from the University of Western Ontario, in addition to an undergraduate degree in Cultural Anthropology earned from a Japanese University. 

During the last decade, she has adopted an itinerant lifestyle that has interrupted a consistent involvement in any single art community; she has re-examined and re-evaluated her desire and capacity as a visual practitioner and now attempts to engage in contemporary art through extended means and pathways. Through such, she continues to use artmaking as a means to follow the lifestyle she wants to live, while addressing the ever-changing state and significance of "art" in our time. She seeks co-conspirators from all fields who may share a similar sentiment and imagination. She has been a co-director of  Residency for Artists On Hiatus (RFAOH) since 2013. #artmakingaslifestyle