Quill Violet Christie-Peters
spilling out, spilling over
January 14 – April 22, 2022
College Art Gallery 2
curator, Leah Taylor
take-away essay by Erica Violet Lee
spilling out, spilling over is comprised of recent painting by Quill Violet Christie-Peters, an Anishinaabe artist and scholar based in Northwestern Ontario. Her work conceptualizes “spilling over boundaries” through Anishinaabekwe practices, moving beyond the material plane to a spiritual form of art-making.
Christie-Peters contemporizes the tradition of Woodlands style painting, often depicting her own body in states of self-pleasure to represent loving acts of reclamation, agency, sovereignty, and spiritual connection. She writes, “It is an image of what my ancestors want for me. They know that my body, so many of our bodies, are withered by this settler colonial weather and so they give us gifts that teach us how to fall in love with our bodies again.”
With evident urgency, Christie-Peters interrogates settler colonialism, holding accountable the capitalist structures that are created on, and occupy, stolen Indigenous land. Her work centres on Anishinaabe futurisms by looking at how ancestral relationships will inform and shape the trajectories to decolonial futures, particularly in the context of displacement and urban Indigenous realities.
Influenced by her father, artist Ron Peters, spilling out, spilling over includes serval of Peters’ key works, presenting the two artists in-conversation with one another. In situ, the impact of intergenerational knowledge, storytelling, resistance, and survival is illustrated, deepening the contextualization of Christie-Peters’ ancestral relations within her work.
Quill Violet Christie-Peters, Making my homelands shake and feel good too, 2018, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy the artist.
Quill Violet Christie-Peters, Desire spilling over body and time, N.D., acrylic on canvas. Courtesy the artist.
About
Quill Violet Christie-Peters is an Anishinaabe arts programmer and self-taught visual artist currently residing in Northwestern Ontario. She currently the Director of Education at the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, where she is coordinating the Emerging Curatorial Training Program. She is the creator of the Indigenous Youth Residency Program, an artist residency for Indigenous youth that engages land-based creative practices through Anishinaabe artistic methodologies. She holds a master’s degree in Indigenous Governance and sits on the board of directors for Native Women in the Arts. Her written work can be found in GUTS Magazine, Backflash Magazine and Tea N’ Bannock.
