Love Songs to End Colonization – Performance Ephemera
Peter Morin and Jimmie Kilpatrick
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Treaty Space Gallery, 1107 Marginal Rd.
Ephemera from Peter Morin (Tahltan Nation) and Jimmie Kilpatrick's (Brandon, MB) participatory karaoke performance April 1st, 2023 will be displayed at the Treaty Space Gallery. Their new album Love Songs to End Colonization repurposes popular love songs to critique and confront settler colonialism and includes both performance and karaoke versions of the tracks. Listeners were invited to perform these love songs at the Art Bar + Projects to contribute to this collective project of singing.
Peter offers:
“These songs, featured on this Karaoke album, were selected from some of my favorite performance artworks (2009 to 2014). In those performances, I made a choice to sing pop songs with my hand drum as a way to acknowledge the heartbreak my Indigenous body was feeling as a result of on-going Canadian colonization...we are asking you to sing these songs with us as a method to end Canadian Colonization of Indigenous territories."
BIOS:
Peter Morin is a grandson of Tahltan Ancestor Artists. Morin’s artistic offerings can be organized around four themes: articulating Land/Knowing, articulating Indigenous Grief/Loss, articulating Community Knowing, and understanding the Creative Agency/Power of the Indigenous body. The work takes place in galleries, in community, in collaboration, and on the land. All of the work is informed by dreams, Ancestors, Family members, and performance art as a research methodology. Initially trained in lithography, Morin’s 20 years of artistic practice moves from printmaking to poetry to button blanket making to installation drum making to bead work to performance art. Throughout his 20 year exhibition and making history, Morin has focused upon his matrilineal inheritances in homage to the matriarchal structuring of the Tahltan Nation, and prioritizes Cross-Ancestral collaborations as a strategy for interrogating and dismantling the colonialism. Morin was longlisted for the Brink and Sobey Awards, in 2013 and 2014, respectively. In 2016, Morin received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Canadian Mid-Career Artist. Morin is working as the Graduate Program Director of the Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art, Media and Design program (IAMD) at OCADU, and the Advisor to the VP Academic on Indigenous Knowledge, Practice and Production. Morin currently holds a tenured appointment in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto. Peter is the son of Janelle Creyke (Crow Clan, Tahltan Nation) and Pierre Morin (French Canadian).
Jimmie Kilpatrick is a musician, educator, and interdisciplinary artist who works as a Sessional Instructor at Brandon University, in Brandon Manitoba. He’s been touring regularly and releasing records on Toronto’s You’ve Changed Records since 2009. Kilpatrick cut his rock & roll teeth in the early 2000’s, as part of the seminal east coast indie outfit Shotgun and Jaybird. He has appeared on recordings by John K. Samson, Christine Fellows, Joel Plaskett and By Divine Right. His 2011 release Transistor Sister was long-listed for Canada’s Polaris Music Prize. Kilpatrick holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Brandon University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Manitoba. In 2018, he was the Manitoba Winner of the BMO 1stART! Competition and presented his performance/installation Quality Control at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in Toronto. Currently, Kilpatrick is working with Tahltan Nation performance artist Peter Morin. Their ongoing collaboration, Love Songs to End Colonization, prioritizes kindness and joy and utilizes karaoke as a methodology for change.
