Duane Linklater: mymothersside
For more than a decade, Duane Linklater (b. 1976; lives and works in North Bay, Ontario) has been making art that interrogates the construct of museums, their conventions, and their historical exclusion of Indigenous people and content. Working across a range of media, including painting, sculpture, and video, he addresses the contradictions of contemporary Indigenous life within and beyond settler systems of knowledge, representation, and value.
Duane Linklater: mymothersside is the artist’s first major survey exhibition. The exhibition includes works in sculpture and video that focus on enduring ancestral practices such as hunting, berry gathering, and fur trading; digital translations of tribal objects held in institutional collections; and a series of large-scale structures made with teepee poles. Appearing amid these culturally significant forms and materials, references to the artist’s family, childhood home, and favorite bands and films suggest an expansive constellation of associations that defy reductive notions of identity. For Linklater, this refusal to be pinned down is an assertion of sovereignty and self-determination—a way to counter ongoing processes of erasure, extraction, and dispossession.