This is the second in a series of performative iterations elaborating on the work done to dismantle colonial monuments while investigating themes of colonial memory, contemporary activism, and future solidarities. After nine years, artists Peter Morin, David Garneau, and Leah Decter return to revisit the now-former site of the John A. Macdonald statue in Katarokwi and newly invited artist Jimmie Kilpatrick. The former statue was removed from City Park on 18 June 2021 by efforts of community activists and through a motion passed by Kingston municipal council members.

Biographies

Leah Decter is a Canadian-based white settler inter-media/performance artist and scholar  who divides her time between Treaty 1 territory and Kjipuktuk/Halifax, where she is an Assistant Professor in Media Arts and a Canada Research Chair in Creative Technologies at NSCAD University. Decter has exhibited, presented, and screened her work widely in Canada and internationally in the US, UK, Germany, Malta, Australia, the Netherlands, and India. Her most recent writing has appeared in Qualitative Inquiry and Performance Matters journals, Paved Meant (Paved Arts), C Magazine (with Tania Willard) and Unsettling Canadian Art History (with Carla Taunton). “Beyond Unsettling: Methodologies for Decolonizing Futures,” a special issue of PUBLIC Journal she co-edited with Carla Taunton, was published in 2022. Decter holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University, and an MFA in New Media from Transart Institute and was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at York 2019-2020.

David Garneau (Métis Nation of Saskatchewan) is a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Regina. He is a painter, curator and critical art writer who engages creative expressions of Indigenous contemporary ways of being. Garneau curated Kahwatsiretátie: The Contemporary Native Art Biennial (Montreal, 2020) with assistance from Faye Mullen and rudi aker; co-curated, with Kathleen Ash Milby, Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound, National Museum of the American Indian, New York (2017); With Secrecy and Despatch, with Tess Allas, for the Campbelltown Art Centre, Sydney, Australia (2016); and Moving Forward, Never Forgetting, with Michelle LaVallee, at the Mackenzie Art Gallery (2015). Garneau has given keynotes on issues such as: mis/appropriation; re/conciliation; public art; museum displays; and Indigenous contemporary art. His performance, Dear John, featuring the spirit of Louis Riel meeting with John A. Macdonald statues, was presented in Regina, Kingston, and Ottawa. David recently installed a large public art work, the Tawatina Bridge paintings, in Edmonton. His recent still life paintings, Dark Chapters, curated by Arin Fay, will tour Canada and be accompanied by a book in fall 2025. In 2023, Garneau was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art: Outstanding Achievement, and was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada.

Jimmie Kilpatrick is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, educator and musician based in Brandon, Manitoba. Working primarily with kinetic sound sculpture, his research explores materiality and form. Kilpatrick’s work routinely incorporates metal, wood, clay, fiber, and explores how organic materials co-mingle with creative technology/electronics, sound, and found objects. His sculptural explorations live as both exhibitions and musical compositions. As a singer songwriter he’s been touring regularly and releasing records on Toronto’s You’ve Changed Records since 2009. 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 works as a sessional Instructor at Brandon University and the University of Manitoba.

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 Masters in Art, Media and Design program at OCADU.

Dr. Erin Sutherland (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Art & Design at the University of Alberta as well as an independent curator. She was also a founding member of Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective in Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton). Recent curated exhibitions include Buffalo Boy: Destiny Manifest (2023) and Jessie Short: From Whose Order and Direction (2024), both at Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre. She also co-curated Let’s Talk About Sex, bb (2019) with Carina Magazenni at the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre and Her Body will Remember (2019) at the Kelowna Art Gallery. She is of Métis and settler decent and is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta.

Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts; Ontario Arts Council; Kingston Municipal Fund; and Queen’s University funding from the Office of Indigenous Initiatives, George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund and the Chancellor Dunning Trust Visitorship.