Peter Morin’s "Ceremony Experiments 1 through 8" and Skawennati "TimeTraveller™ Episodes 01-06"

Urban Shaman’s Main Gallery

Peter Morin: "Ceremony Experiments 1 through 8"

Dates: Friday, February 1 to March 8, 2012

Opening Reception at 8pm | Artist Talk at 9pm, Friday, February 1, 2013

Peter Morin’s Ceremony Experiments 1 through 8 are a careful examination of interrupting colonization. Ceremony is a carefully organized examination of the world. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end to ceremony. The participants are activators of change and transformation often occurs. Indigenous knowledge is shaped by the flow of ceremony. Cree Scholar Shawn Wilson’s book Research is Ceremony has informed Morin’s work as a maker of Ceremony Experiments— Cree scholar Shawn Wilson (2008) writes,

“The shared aspect of an Indigenous ontology and epistemology is relationally, or that relationships form reality. The shared aspect of an Indigenous axiology and methodology is that research must maintain accountability to all the relationships that it forms.”

Ceremony, and the subsequent spaces that are created, develop strong connections with the land. Morin’s Ceremony Experiments 1 through 8 pose the questions, ‘How do we acknowledge the transformation? and what happens after the ceremony is finished?’ The experiments are a record of Morin’s attempts to interrupt colonization and return to the source of Tahltan Nation knowledge. Morin has organized the exhibition around the shape and flow of the Tahltan Land. The Land also informs where the knowledge, AKA the shape of organization for the experiments, comes from.

Biography: Peter Morin is a member of the Tahltan Nation of Telegraph Creek, BC. Tahltan people walk on the land. Tahltan people share stories of our travel with each other. These stories are of people in motion on the land, creating fluid organizational structures. Morin's artistic focus articulates experience connected to cultural practice in-relation to these fluid systems of organizing knowledge. Morin's work acknowledges that the creative process connected to indigenous-based objects, and knowledge structures, tells the history of our communities.

Indigenous artists become the historians of these ways of knowing. Artwork is the history of our people. We are philosophers. We understand that History and Philosophy are closely aligned. We have thought about the theoretical components of ceremony and applied material production. This supports the spiritual well-being of the community. Land, History, Identity, Story, Singing, and Drumming create Ceremony. Ceremony is well developed. The objects that support history become prayers for the survival of our community. This knowledge about the process to create these objects is often missing from the western museum. Ceremony is our Museum. Ceremony interrupts colonization. This is significant.

In the Urban Shaman’s

Marvin Francis Memorial Media Gallery

Skawennati: "TimeTraveller™ Episodes 01-06"

Dates: Friday, February 1 to March 8, 2012

Opening Reception at 8pm | Artist Talk at 9pm, Friday, February 1, 2013

The TimeTraveller™ glasses enable you to be immersed in the environment. The HUD (Heads-up Display) gives you all the information you need to enjoy it - where and when you are; what languages are being spoken (along with a real-time translator), maps, and, of course, the Find–A–Date Search Engine. We take the information from historical records and use it to create 3D environments and avatars that are true replicas of the ones that existed in history.

Biography: Skawennati is an artist and independent curator with a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal. Since 1996, she has been working in New Media, beginning with the pioneering, Aboriginally determined, on-line gallery and chat space, CyberPowWow. Her own artwork, which addresses history, the future, and change, has been widely exhibited. Imagining Indians in the 25th Century, a web-based paper doll/time-travel journal has been presented across North America, most notably in Artrain USA’s three-year, coast-to-coast tour of the show “Native Views: Influences of Modern Culture”. A print version of this piece is in the collection of the Canada Art Bank. 80 Minutes, 80 Movies, 80s Music, her ongoing series of one-minute music videos, continues to grow; and her current production, TimeTraveller™, is a multi-platform project featuring a machinima series. Its website, timetravellertm.com won imagineNative’s 2009 Best New Media Award. Skawennati is currently Co-Director, with Jason E. Lewis, of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, a network of artists, academics and technologists investigating, creating and critiquing Aboriginal virtual environments. Their project, Otsì, a game mod created with students from Kahnawake Survival School, won ImagineNative’s 2010 Best New Media Award. Skawennati has also been awarded a 2011 Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art.

For press interviews with either artists please contact Daina Warren ASAP at daina@urbanshaman.org