Duane Linklater's practice is heavily entwined with his Omaskêko Cree identity, community, and heritage. Working across film and video, photography, installation, sculpture, and text, the First Nations artist challenges the relationship between museums and indigenous peoples and their objects.
Read MoreLinklater was born in Moose Factory, Ontario, Canada. He studied Native Studies and Painting at the University of Alberta and later received an MFA in Film and Video from the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College in 2012. He has since exhibited widely in his native Canada and internationally, sometimes collaborating with his wife Tanya Lukin Linklater, an Alaska Native artist and choreographer.
Duane Linklater consistently challenges settler and colonialist frameworks, using contemporary art as a decolonial tool. His use of indigenous objects and symbols within institutional spaces works to recontextualise indigenous histories and stories in the museum context. His installations range from displaying personal items, like slippers and mittens handmade by his grandmother, to more symbolic sculptures; the teepee, for example, is a frequent motif, as seen in his 2018 installation pêyakotênaw on the High Line in New York.
Linklater is a versatile artist, extending his exploration of indigenous and settler relationships into film. Most notably, he collaborated with fellow First Nations artist Brian Jungen on Modest Livelihood (2012), a 50-minute silent film commissioned for dOCUMENTA (13) and displayed at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff in 2012. The film follows Linklater and Jungen on a hunting trip, showing traditional practices still in use and commenting on the controversial history of documentaries on indigenous cultures, as well as the present need for indigenous groups to document their land use in order to protect their land rights.
Linklater was one of six indigenous artists selected to install artwork in the Indigenous Art Park in Edmonton, Alberta. His sculpture, mikikwan, was unveiled in 2018. It is a large-scale reproduction of a bone hide scraper, memorialising the labour of indigenous communities who have used this tool historically and into the present.
That same year, Linklater also undertook a public commission Kâkikê/Forever for the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Saskatchewan, in which the words 'as long as the sun shines, the river flows, and the grass grows' grace the facade of the museum. Spoken by indigenous people during treaty negotiations, the phrase sparks reflection on the consequential differences in the worldviews of indigenous peoples and settlers.
In 2017, Linklater was the first artist to participate in the Don River Valley Art Program, installing Monsters for Beauty, Permanence and Individuality, consisting of cast concrete gargoyles along the Lower Don Trail in Toronto. These gargoyles act as 'protectors' of the colonialist urban space, infringing upon the natural landscape within and around Toronto.
Awards include the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award, Canada Council for the Arts (2016); Sobey Art Award, Sobey Art Foundation (2013); and the John Hartman Award, MacLaren Art Centre (2011).
Duane Linklater has participated in the following solo exhibitions: mymothersside, Frye Museum of Art, Seattle (2021); Field Station: Duane Linklater, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing (2017); From Our Hands, Mercer Union, Toronto and 80WSE Gallery, NYU Steinhardt School, New York (2016); and salt 11: Duane Linklater, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City (2015).
Group exhibitions include Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as it's Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); Riopelle: The Call of Northern Territories and Indigenous Cultures, Musée des beaux-arts Montréal, Montreal (2020); Danica Barboza, Jason Hirata, Yuki Kimura, Duane Linklater, Artists Space, New York (2019); SOFT POWER, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2019); Beautiful World, where are you?, Liverpool Biennial (2018); and Many things brought from one climate to another, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2015).
Duane Linklater's website can be found here.
Rachel Kubrick | Ocula | 2022
