"I Love Artesian" Fundraiser

Have you ever seen a concert on our stage that you didn’t want to end? Take in a night of poetry that makes you think? Laughed until your sides hurt with some of Regina’s best comedians and improvisers? We are so proud of the work we get to do in our community and the experiences we get to bring to life in our venue. The artistic aspirations of this community are great, and it is truly an honour to support them throughout the year. This event is the one time a year we host an event with the specific goal of raising money for the operations of the organization. If you love what the Artesian does, you can rest assured that your support for this fundraiser goes directly to helping us do more of the same great things.

This year’s fundraiser will feature poetry by Austin “The Noble Savage” Ahenakew, comedy from David Carnegie, storytelling and theatre from Skyler Anderson, musical performances by Marissa Burwell, DJ sets from DJ BABY throughout the night and our friend Megan Nash returning as the host of the event. The evening will feature a variety of short, engaging performances from these groups as well as a raffle, 50/50 draw, and a whole lot of love. Don’t miss this years’ “I Love Artesian” fundraiser event, May 13, 2023!

Show Details:
"I Love Artesian" Fundraising Event
Saturday, May 13th, 2023
Doors: 7:00 PM
Show: 8:00 PM

Ticket Prices:
General Admission: $25.00
General Admission plus $25.00 charitable donation - $50.00
General Admission plus $75.00 charitable donation - $100.00

*Patrons that purchase tickets that include charitable donations will be issued charitable tax receipts in the corresponding donation amount ($25 on a $50 ticket, $75 on a $100 ticket) for 2023.*

The Artesian is wheelchair accessible, all-ages, and a proud supporter of positive spaces initiatives with a zero-tolerance policy towards hate, harassment, and/or discrimination. We reserve the right to remove any patron creating an unsafe environment. The accessible entrance is available via a lift, Please ask staff for help if necessary.

Thank you to our Entertainment Sponsor:

About the Artists:

Marissa Burwell is an indie act from the heart of Saskatchewan, known best for her captivating yet endearing performances. Her debut self-titled EP was released in 2019 creating a buzz that allowed appearances at international festivals including Reeperbahn, Liverpool Sound City, and Breakout West. And now, on the heels of her self-titled EP, Burwell remerges as a fully realized artist.

Burwell’s debut full-length album, Bittersweet is set to release on January 28, 2022. Bittersweet demonstrates remarkable growth, both as a songwriter and with her sonic palette. Her warm, summery voice and wry wit remain but beneath its indie-folk exterior, the album is adorned with lush keys, warm synth passages, and subtle drum programming. Lyrically it is her most personal work, full of images of dinner parties, church, gardens and that darkness that comes in waves and comes in seasons. Born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan she writes one eye focused on childhood, the other gazing toward a hopeful future, and both feet planted firmly in the snow.

Austin "The Noble Savage" Ahenakew has a unique style that weaves rhythm into storytelling and announces an urgent truth from the perspective of an Indigenous youth. Bringing an unapologetic approach to Indigenous struggles, abuse, PTSD and how skin colour is viewed. He brings sweet words to stage without sugar coating any part of the truth. 

David Carnegie

You may have seen David at Artesian as a stand up comedian, improviser, year-end quiz show host, or a spectator. He has been involved in the Regina comedy scene for longer than you think. Unless it's been as long as you think it is.

DJ BABY is a multimedia artist from Treaty 4, Saskatchewan. Demonstrating a spectrum of bops from dance music to rage trap, she focuses to establish and celebrate the through lines that genre have long come to sanitize. DJ BABY’s love for all forms of art inspire her approach to DJ’ing, as she looks to tie together her interests over a variety of genres and techniques.

Skyler Anderson is a proud father of 2 boys who he dedicates all his work to. He holds a degree in Theatre from the First Nations University of Canada and is also a sessional theatre and indigenous visual art instructor at the University of Regina. In 2021, Sky curated, directed, and performed in a play reading series for Globe Theatre. The following winter he performed in a musical play performance with Globe Theatre titled, Making Spirits Bright, that was remounted in winter 2022. In Spring 2022 he developed a storytelling piece that was based on stories from his life titled, Holdin’ on to What’s Golden, which he performed as a one-person show in the Globe Theatre’s 2022 Main Stage Season. In the summer of 2022 Sky put his focus into playwriting and wrote two shows, metawemin and With Two Fingers. metawemin was written with his son and his two frequent collaborators, Erin Goodpipe and Tyler Toppings, and was presented in front of a private audience. It was then workshopped further in the Persephone Theatre Incubator Series in Saskatoon and had full performances to live audiences. With Two Fingers is a TYA piece that he’s been developing for a decade, and he produced a live presentation in November of 2022.

Megan Nash

Throughout their self-produced upcoming album Soft Focus Futures, Megan Nash mines the death of her marriage for clues that could decode its demise and set her on a path toward some sort of stability in self. In the process, they achieve a distillation of heartache and its attendant, all-consuming power that arrives like a 100-year flood in blossoming crescendos buoyed by precise poetry evoking unnatural disasters, the tyranny of silence, old dogs, and the isolation of life in the country. The blue hues, unsteady triumph, and emotional grandeur of Soft Focus Futures earns a spiritual kinship with author Elizabeth Smart’s masterpiece, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, about Smart’s affair with George Barker. “The water submerges and blends, but I am not dead,” Smart writes about grief and love. “O I am not dead. I am under the sea. The entire sea is on top of me.”

After “Table For One” sets a scene of quiet devastation with a sparse acoustic guitar strum, the slow-building tidal wave of “Artifact” reveals the loneliness of separation’s aftermath: “Our love is an island where we used to live,” Nash sings over the song’s dreamy wash. “It was swallowed by the ocean.” With “My Own Heart,” she seeks a cosmos-sized space in which she’s able to learn to be alone with herself; the more grounded, guitar-fuelled “Coffee” hammers home the less desirable realities of that isolation, like bad dates and the fear that that accompanies being on your own in a creaky old house. With incisive, earthy verse, Nash invokes the particularities of their Prairie home, parsing through childhood memories of her family’s small farm and searching for her place in that lineage with “Another Silent Night,” while using the vernacular of small-town gossip to paint a lonesome rural scene on “Are We Still In Love?” The sonic scope of “Chew Quietly/Clean Slate” looms vast over anxieties about meeting someone new, deploying epic, frenzied breakdowns to communicate inner turmoil. As the curtain closes, Nash is careful to avoid claiming resolution or closure—the nature of those concepts are fickle at best—and instead chooses to let her heart beat out “the poisonous rhythm of the truth.” But the silence lingering in the exhales intertwined at the end of “Table For One (reprise)” begins to, maybe, carve out space once again for a great flood of love.

Soft Focus Futures was released via acronym Records on what would’ve been the fourth anniversary of her wedding—November 3, 2021. To build the album’s lush soundscapes, Nash turned to their long-time musical co-conspirators the Best of Intentions, composed of talented multi-instrumentalists Dana Rempel, Darnell Stewart, and Tanner Wilhelm Hale. Additional contributions feature Brady Frank, Dalton Lam, Digawolf, Stacy Tinant, Jenna Nash, Logan Amon, and Megan’s wizened dog Shiloh, to whom she dedicates a poem in the liner notes of the album. Soft Focus Futures was officially engineered by Dana Rempel, but in most cases, because of pandemic restrictions, each contributing player individually recorded their own parts in a collective act of camaraderie that testifies to the closeness of those involved and their faith in the quality of Nash’s work. Despite the distance, Soft Focus Futures is a cohesive creation that sounds as though it was made in the presence of dear friends so close they could breathe on one another. The album was mixed and mastered by Justin Bender at Divergent Sounds Studio.

Nash uses both she and they pronouns and lives on Treaty 4 Territory. They’ve won and been nominated for numerous awards, including a 2019 JUNO Award nomination for Contemporary Roots Album of the Year for Seeker and a 2021 Best of Moose Jaw Award for Best Musical Artist. The recognition back home is in no small part due to her long and winding history of hitting the road, having performed in the United States, the UK, Germany, Portugal and Estonia on top of countless gigs in Canada’s small towns and sprawling metropolises. With everyone’s health top of mind on the touring schedule to come, rest assured you’ll be able to see them—and hear Soft Focus Futures live—the minute she’s able to safely hit your town.