Peter Morin biography

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. Morin began art school in 1997, completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver in 2001 and his Masters in Fine Arts in 2010 at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan. Initially trained in lithography, Morin’s artistic practice moves from Printmaking to Poetry to Beadwork to Installation to Drum Making to Performance Art. Peter is the son of Janelle Creyke (Crow Clan, Tahltan Nation) and Pierre Morin (Quebecois). Throughout his 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. 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. Peter Morin currently holds a tenured appointment in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, and is the Graduate Program Director of the Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art, Media and Design program at OCADU.

About Love Songs to End Colonization

This vinyl album that you are holding in your hands is the world’s first karaoke album/performance art object. You might be asking yourself: what makes this a Karaoke album? What makes this a Performance Art Object? What’s the point? Karaoke is the method. And when you hold this album, you are holding the memory/intention of those original performances featuring these pop songs. The karaoke singing is how we come in closer together to remake the world. These songs, featured on this Karaoke album, were selected from some of my favourite 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 heart break my Indigenous body was feeling as a result of on-going Canadian colonization. If you are holding this album, we are asking you to sing these songs with us as a method to end Canadian colonization of Indigenous territories. Love Songs to End Colonization is our intersection. This is our X marking the spot. This is where we meet at the Karaoke Performance Art Bar of our dreams. We choose to cross these powerful lines, lines of Performance Art/Karaoke/Time Travel/Fun/Fear. I love Performance Art. I love Karaoke. I’ve learned, after being a Performance artist for the last 15 years, that Karaoke is a lot like Performance Art. I’ve also learned that it takes a village to make a good performance. So, now it’s up to you. Invite some friends over. Find a record player. Read the lyrics from the album cover. Light a candle. Put on a disco ball. Honour your Karaoke style. I’m a bit of a shout singer myself. Drink some booze if that’s your thing. Drink some juice or coffee if that’s your thing. It’s time to lend your voices to this collective project of singing so that we can see each other unmake colonization.

- Peter Morin 2022

A message from Tania Willard,

These songs are meant to touch your heart in joy, in sorrow, and in combination of both. These songs are meant to create heart networks that resonate deeply with Morin’s base tone as its reverberating under the surface to be felt as waves of resonance through the body. To experience these works fully, you need to imagine loud laughs, the church of karaoke sacrament, Indigenous heart, and a depth of sound that is now and is from before. This brother, he is a brother to many, contains heaps of laughing hearts that link together like cell phones creating networks of joy, the kind of joy that comes from also knowing the void where joy should be. This heart network can share – it’s like air drop- our hive mind, our embodied thinking, that creeps out beyond our own minds finding others and making friends. I think this includes crow minds and tree minds and swimmer minds and more flyer minds. This jam can reach out to you and plug you in if you want it to, or you can experience it just for you as a big ol heart laugh or as a note resonating sound vibrations and rippling through the vast relational nets we cast. You have heard crows right, how they encourage each other; I think they lift each other up, into a loudness that is crow joy, it makes you a temporary crow just so you can borrow that laugh inside you and it can spend a moment fixing any leaky parts. Then that joy is pushed out in a diaphragm spasm of air returning on wings to the other crows. After this laughter and these crow enunciations have worked through you, they suggest that you share in the beauty of being loud together, listening, mimicking, creating anew. Shiny sounds, loud sounds, leftover sounds discarded are happy to be received; sounds that score, sounds that are scored, and those that are unscored become black wings that gather together, making and unmaking vibrations of voice into what has become the night sky of their wings. Constellations of joy that are sparkling as songs; maybe this brother will sing them, maybe that mother or this sister or hola even that cuzzin, it’s going to be good. You need to listen with your sky, listen with your networked heart, and post to your ancestors about their future grandchildren. You might think this all sounds grand, but grandness is in every moment especially raucous moments of belting out karaoke calls, dialing in disparate moments, minds, hearts and time/zones, to remember that joke, that song, that time...to all the times to come.

Listen through sky

Listen through land

Listen to the water

Listen through bone

Listen through muscle

Listen through laughter

Listen through heart

Sing along together, our circle grows when we sing together.

Sing with the sky

Sing with the land

Sing to the water

Sing in your dreams

Sing along with laughing hearts…oh boy and also love song songs, ha!

Tania Willard, Secwepemc Nation, works within the shifting ideas of contemporary and traditional as it relates to cultural arts and production. As assistant professor in Creative Studies at UBCO (Kelowna BC) currently her research focuses on Secwepemc aesthetics/language/land and interrelated Indigenous art practices. Willard’s projects include BUSH gallery, a conceptual space for land based art and action led by Indigenous artists.

A message from Kevin Ei-ichi DeForest,

Thursday nights at the Decker. That was where the real magic first happened for Peter and I. Where we became karaoke regulars in a sketchy bar on the main drag of the abandoned downtown in small town southwestern Manitoba. Living in rural redneck country as a person of colour needs a point of release from the everyday weight of systemic racism. The karaoke moment can be the potential site of a sea change of resistance. Singing together as an intimate place to share love, hurt and laughter as much as collectively acknowledging the power of song. If you are lucky enough to have a pop song redefine your life’s priorities, coalesce your identity and help you figure out who you are then you know what I mean. Whether that might come from David Bowie defending the right to be whoever you want to be in “Changes”. Or Beyonce rallying African American women’s collective strength through her inspiration as powerful role model in “Formation”. #churchofkaraoke

Peter Morin understands all too well this empowering principle of song. The album you have in your hands is here to protect you, to provide resistance from colonization through your singing body. As opposed to it being a covers record, it is instead a performance artifact. These recordings faithfully capture karaoke renditions of Peter’s pop song faves. They are here for you to soak in his performance as well as to collaborate and sing along with him. You also have the instrumental tracks on their own, in classic hip-hop fashion, for you to remix with your own Acapella version or bestie group chant. Just make sure there’s a turntable at your next kitchen party.

A great pop song has to have remarkable emotional relatability. As if the lyrics somehow read like the messy confessions in your private journals. There is a palpable connection in experiencing a song that goes beyond its words. That familiar melancholic lilt in the vocal melody, or the sturdy, memorable arrangement of the music can work in powerful and empowering ways. That listening experience can somehow bring complicated emotional situations of heartbreak, love and loss profoundly to the surface. Sharing that aural vulnerability also has the ability to provide resistance and resilience.

Paying tribute to the original recorded version by singing from your own space aligns that emotional energy into your personal experience. By repurposed these pop songs of heartbreak, love and loss against colonial aggression, your engagement with these songs can be like medicine. It can build immunity and provide strength against colonization. As a portable performance artwork, please enjoy this very live capturing of Peter’s karaoke performance. Sing with this record, in unity, from the heart and the guts, to complete the performance cycle. Then put that needle back on again.

I’d like to dedicate this writing to my karaoke spirit animal Hanako, a sweet Jack Russell Terrier who helped me see the simple importance of loving as the glue holding the whole network of friends and community together). I sing also for you, always.

Kevin Ei-ichi DeForest is a visual, multimedia artist, and Karaoke singer. He was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba to Japanese and Swiss parents. Kevin is an Associate Professor IshKaabatens Waasa Gaa Inaabateg Department of Visual Art at Brandon University.