Start your search by typing

the x is where our paths cross

the x is where our paths cross is an exhibition centered in the performance work of hosting and guesting through visiting, trust, and otherwise possibilities. Peter Morin (Tahltan, French Canadian) and Leah Decter (Jewish-Canadian white-settler) mark the crossing of paths across time, territories, and ancestries through reading aloud as an assertion of Indigenous sovereignty and listening-while-drawing as a practice of white-settler accountability. The exhibition features videos of performances in which Morin reads Tahltan stories “collected” by white anthropologist James Teit while Decter draws Tahltan territory from Morin’s family photos, alongside the drawings, digital photographs, and artist book produced throughout their ongoing collaboration. Morin and Decter will also present a live site-specific performance that marks a new tributary of crossing in this ongoing project.

Please join us for a performance by Peter Morin and Leah Decter on Saturday, October 10, 2026. Stay tuned for more details.

Peter Morin and Leah Decter discuss their ongoing collaboration in the bi-annual electronic journal, Performance Matters, Vol. 10, Iss. 2 (2024).
VIEW ARTICLE

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

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’s artistic practice moves from printmaking to poetry to beadwork to drum making to button blanket making to installation to performance art. Morin’s is the son of Janelle Morin (Crow Clan, Tahltan Nation) and Pierre Morin (French-Canadian). Throughout his exhibition and making history, Morin has focused upon his matrilineal inheritances in homage to the matriarchal structuring of the Tahltan Nation and throughout his 20+ year art/history continues to prioritizes Cross-Ancestral collaborations. In 2016, Morin received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Canadian Mid-Career Artist. In 2024, Morin was long listed for the Sobey Art Prize. Morin is a member of artist collectives: BUSH gallery and O’kinādās, and an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCADU) in Toronto.

Leah Decter is an artist and independent scholar based in Treaty 1 territory. Working from a critical white settler perspective her solo and collaborative art and research practices address and disturb social-spatial dynamics of settler
colonial whiteness through ethics of intergenerational accountability and beingin-relation. Her artwork straddles performance and media arts, textiles and installation using the strategic deployment of personal and national narratives, embodied place-based activations, relational practices, and the manipulation of iconic “Canadiana,” to challenge dominant conceptions of “Canadian-ness,” and enact non-colonial practices and relations. She has exhibited, performed, presented and screened her artwork widely in Canada, and internationally in the US, UK, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, Malta, Brazil and India. Decter’s artwork has appeared in numerous publications and recent publications of her academic and creative writing include texts in Qualitative Inquiry and Performance Matters journals, chapters in Making (Eco)Logical: Locating Canadian Arts in the Environmental Humanities, Routledge Companion to Performance Art (forthcoming) and, with Carla Taunton, Settler Responsibilities Towards Decolonisation and a special issue of PUBLIC Journal titled “Beyond Unsettling: Methodologies for Decolonizing Futures.” A Canada Research Chair in Creative Technologies in NSCAD University’s Media Arts from 2020-2025, Decter holds an MFA in New Media from Transart Institute and a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University.