Between the North Pole & New York City 2004
This was a kind of sequel to the Regina Five documentary A World Away, building on an aspect that extended decades beyond their time in Saskatchewan.
The project was influenced and informed by an exhibition curated by Dr. John O’Brian for Saskatoon’s Mendel Art Gallery, which showed the long history and extensive influence of the Emma Lake Artists Workshops that had been initiated by Regina Five member Ken Lochhead in 1955, building on a history of artist gatherings at Emma Lake since the 1930s. I saw the exhibition The Flat Side of the Landscape when it was at Regina’s MacKenzie Art Gallery.
I brought the project to Regina producer Lori Kuffner, and we put together broadcast pre-licenses with Bravo!, SCN and B.C.’s The Knowledge Network.
Cinematographer Darryl Kesslar had been a film school classmate at the University of Regina, and it was a lot of fun to travel with Darryl and interview people associated with the Emma Lake Artists Workshops. To New York to talk to Frank Stella in his massive studio, curator Karen Wilkins in her loft, painter Kenneth Noland in an upper east side hotel, and Janice Van Horne, the widow of the critic Clement Greenberg, in her upper west side apartment across from Central Park. Sitting on her sofa, underneath a Kenneth Noland painting and drinking a Cutty Sark is a pretty good memory. We did a road trip from NYC to talk to Robert Murray in rural Pennsylvania and Darryl and I traveled to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico to interview the painter Noni Mulcaster, who was then in her 90s and still riding her horse every day.
We flew to London for a couple days to interview the sculptor Sir Anthony Caro, who’d just come from a dental appointment, but was kind and cheery despite a swollen face. While in London I got to catch a favourite actor Jim Broadbent in Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, and Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern.
We also got to interview some major figures of Emma Lake’s history in Saskatoon: the painters Dorothy Knowles and William Perehudoff, and curator and painter Terry Fenton. We shot during the 2003 Emma Lake Workshop led by curator Karen Wilkins and artist Clay Ellis. Less than a decade after releasing Between the North Pole & New York City, the 50+ year run of the Emma Lake Artists Workshops came to an end.
Between the North Pole & New York City had its broadcast premiere in 2004.
The final Emma Lake Artists Workshop took place in 2012. The dining hall was demolished, and many of the cabins moved off-site. As of 2026, the future of the site is uncertain.
As I started work on the project, I received a job offer to become a faculty member in the Department of Media Production & Studies (now the Department of Film) at the University of Regina, and I returned to my hometown in 2003.
48 minutes. Standard Definition Video
