Artists Peter Morin and Jimmie Kilpatrick are friends who share an abiding love for karaoke. Their ongoing artistic collaboration, Love Songs to End Colonization, prioritizes kindness and joy and uses karaoke as a methodology for social change.
During a residency from March 25 – April 2 at NSCAD supported by Arts Nova Scotia, the Anna Leonowens Gallery, the Centre for InterMedia Arts and Decolonial Expression (CIMADE), and the NSCAD Treaty Space Gallery, Morin and Kilpatrick gave an artist talk, held open studios, made a new karaoke-art video for Richie Haven’s “High Flying Bird”, and held a participatory karaoke performance at the NSCAD’s Art Bar.
Peter Morin is a grandson of Tahltan Ancestor Artists. His work is informed by dreams, Ancestors, Family members, and performance art as a research methodology. He holds a tenured appointment in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto and is co-director of CIMADE with NSCAD’s Leah Decter, who is a Canada Research Chair in Creative Technologies and Community Engagement.
Jimmie Kilpatrick is a musician, educator, and interdisciplinary artist who works as a Sessional Instructor at Brandon University, in Brandon 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.
“We are so fortunate to have the opportunity to host Peter and Jimmie and to support them to bring the Love Songs to End Colonization project to NSCAD and Halifax. This has been a phenomenal culmination of Peter’s two visits to NSCAD this semester as the first CIMADE Artist In Residence. It’s been a great way to introduce Peter to the NSCAD community as the co-director of CIMADE and to highlight Peter and Jimmie’s art practices and collaborative work. They’re both part of CIMADE’s expanding community and we look forward to hosting them in the future,” says Decter.
Karaoke nights in Brandon, Manitoba
The seeds of the Love Songs to End Colonization project began in 2015 at the Double Decker in Brandon, Manitoba, where Kilpatrick emceed a weekly karaoke night.
“It was a kind of community building. The idea was to create a space in the bar and a space in the community to get together to sing,” Kilpatrick says.
A transformative moment for Morin was how Kilpatrick had re-positioned the video screen: it was behind the singer, so the audience could read the lyrics, too. This completely changed the dynamic of the performance from individual to communal.
“First, when it started, everyone sat at different tables. Then, after a month, everyone was at the same table. You get to know people’s songs and see them affected by their brilliance.”
Repurposing pop songs as performance art
Many of Morin’s performance art pieces from 2005 to 2015 utilize pop songs, specifically break-up and love songs, to remind people that Indigenous people’s culture is as much in this contemporary as it lives in both the past and future.
“Katy Perry’s Fireworks can be added into Indigenous practice. There is an important message of love in that song. Fireworks can be a song that helps you to understand who you are in this world, specifically helping to understand what you are feeling in this world. And singer-songwriters helped me with building a language to help me understand what my Indigenous body was feeling in this place now known as Canada. Those singer-songwriters have done some of the important work of finding language that helps you to move through complicated emotions and you can lean into those words when you need them,” says Morin.
In one performance for 2009 at Open Space (Victoria BC), Morin sang “High Flying Bird” by Richie Havens directly into the walls of the art gallery. For the performance artwork, Morin was channeling Joseph Beuys as a strategy to heal the gallery. In another performance artwork, titled This is what happens when you perform the memory of the land (part 2), he sang and danced “Bone Machine” by The Pixies, and afterward alongside artist Skawennati he danced to “Sweet Nothing” by Calvin Harris on repeat for almost 40 minutes, dancing and jumping while blindfolded as the audience formed a dance circle around him.
Kilpatrick and Morin first performed as an art duo as part of a Mountain Standard Time (M:ST) in Calgary. Peter and Jimmie sang Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Not the Loving Kind” with support from Jesse Carlson and Crystal White, to an empty wheat field on the Granger Farm, for 5 hours. It was during this performance that Kilpatrick and Morin learned that singing a song can change the DNA of the space.
“A popular love song becomes a car ad, or a popular song can become a movement for change, like a Woman’s Warrior’s song, that originates with the Lil’wat Nation, which is heard at Indigenous gatherings and protests across the country,” they say.
“There is so much about the collaborative work that I love,” Morin adds. “One of my favorite moments is when Jimmie and I get to remind the folks in the room that We are the love songs that end colonization. And that we can actually end this thing that is continuing to harm us all.”
Recording a double album
They launched Love Songs to End Colonization as a double album in August 2022 at the Dunlop Art Gallery, featuring songs repurposed from Peter’s performance art career, including Cat Stevens’ The First Cut is the Deepest, Tina Turner’s What’s Love Got to Do With It, Songs: OHIA’s version of Conway Twitty’s Hello Darlin’, and AC/DC’s Who Made Who.
The album is a performance art object that utilizes the spirit of karaoke to effect change. They say, ‘Karaoke is about an experience and the energy attached to it. The songs translate emotion into a physical act’.
The double album was recorded by José Contreras from By Divine Right. Morin and Kilpatrick sing on the first album and on the second, you have Kilpatrick’s backing tracks that listeners could sing along to.
“If you sing along with me, you are amplifying that original moment and you are making it your own. You are amplifying our intentions as well. When we join our voices together we are a magnificent voice,” says Morin.
They recorded as if they were a karaoke club, using a basic microphone, a PA, and video screen.
“I am admittedly not a good singer,” Peter says. “I was so nervous, sometimes I am just shouting. That spirit in the singing comes through. The only way to sing it was to tell the story to get your body to that moment.”
A karaoke night at NSCAD’s Art Bar
On Saturday, April 1, people jammed into NSCAD’s Art Bar to sing songs. After a brief talk introducing the performance and some warmup songs, they passed the mic to the audience, who chose their own love songs to end colonization.
“The communal performance that is central to karaoke is also central to the impetus for change and reconciliation, which is a collective act,” the duo says.
They have seen through experience how people become emboldened by the spirit of performing. NSCAD students sang Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated”, Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” “Love -> Building on Fire,” by the Talking Heads, and many more love songs to end colonization that turned the night into a sing-along with big rounds of applause.
“For those three minutes, you are a star, and you feel like a star. And the people watching realize that they are watching a star. This performance is guided by those three minutes, and in those minutes we offer the singer a chance to reframe their relationship to colonization and the act of decolonizing in Canada.”
It’s infectious, and transformational because the performances prioritize love and joy, the duo says.
“Folks are singing songs that they love, and that are meaningful to them, and because of that, possibility is amplified and maybe that possibility can mean a different kind of future.”
Follow Peter Morin, Jimmie Kilpatrick and CIMADE at NSCAD on Instagram to stay up to date with their work.