Love, in Five Parts
Suzanne Morrissette
"This is a moment of despair for a great many people, including me at times. We are living in a moment of profound global atrocity matched by shocking complacency that paradoxically retains fierce ongoing inequity and bigotry. That context is also changing alongside global shifts in power and proto-fascism that is rising in the neighbourhoods of our friends and family. With global climate change and the needs of Indigenous peoples now taking a backseat to strong political expressions of Canadian economic and political sovereignty, it can be difficult to see a way back to futures once dreamed, futures wherein today's children can grow old and make their contributions in a good way for a world they want to inherit.
Love, in Five Parts is a project that looks to love as an antidote (not the antidote) to despair in the face of global atrocity and immense violence. It is also a practice of futurity. Love is messy, it is honest, and it is vulnerable. It shines through impossible situations. Rendering love as beauty - not as a thing of elevated taste but as an every day thing which surrounds us - is an act of defiance against despair because it requests of us to do the passionate work which as a writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin once stated, holds the world together.
Love, in Five Parts draws from this motive, posing five scenes which reunites those who are separated by time or circumstance, inflected by the harms of racial capitalism, to reimagine what might otherwise seem like impossible futures."
- Suzanne Morrissette
about Suzanne Morrissette
Suzanne Morrissette, PhD (she/her) is a Red River Métis artist, curator, and scholar who is currently based out of Toronto. She is currently Associate Professor at OCAD University and chair of the Indigenous visual Culture bfa program. As an arts-based researcher Suzanne’s interests include: reciprocal and gift economies, equity and diversity, pedagogies of parenting, as well as culturally informed governance models in the arts. As an artist she works across media to produce artworks that reflect upon metaphors for the knowledege. She holds an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practices from OCAD University and a PhD in Social and Political Thought from York University.
Recent artistic projects include: the shape of transference, a solo exhibition at the MacLaren art gallery (barrie), ENTendre, a solo exhibition at a space gallery (toronto), to notice, a 150’ installation of light and shadow for Nuit Blanche Etobicoke, and an audio-visual commission by imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival called Where they begin I continue. Her solo exhibition What does good work look like? opened at Gallery 44 (Toronto) in 2022 and travelled to C’CAP (Winnipeg) in 2023. Recent curatorial projects include: How can I know you? (2024) a group show about the agency of land-based material at the Art Gallery of Burlington, and Otakosik Tapwa’win, an interactive online oral history project with Indigenous artists in Winnipeg from the 70s, 80s, and 90s. She has published with cmagazine. Her forthcoming book But have we arrived? explores the liberalism’s failed promises to Indigenous artists, and is contracted to ARP Books with a planned for release in September 2026.
Morrissette’s father’s family are Michif- and Cree-speaking Métis with family histories tied to the Interlake and Red River regions and Scrip in the area now known as Manitoba. Her mother’s parents came from Canadian-born farming families descended from United Empire loyalists and Mennonites from Russia. Morrissette was born and raised in Winnipeg and is a citizen of the Manitoba Métis Federation.