CHICAGO — Duane Linklater has built a most unlikely structure: a huge teepee that sticks out of the wall rather than the ground. Its 20-foot-long poles are bare, uncovered by the canvas hanging directly from the lashings. As a metaphor for today’s horribly twisted world, “dislodgevanishskinground” is as apt as any. But it’s not an upside-down house or a horse hanging from the ceiling, it’s a sideways teepee, and as fake as that sounds, it’s also fantastical and daring, with emphatic cultural specificity.
The tipi is one of two to see in my mother, Linklater’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Also included are eight other tipi blankets, a pack of tipi poles, 3D printed and re-photographed native artwork, a trio of furs, an old avocado-colored refrigerator, an oversized hoodie dyed with cochineal and carried by a counterfeit Greco-Roman statue from Wayfair, a banner touting both The Cure and the American Indian Movement, and a few videos, one made in reference to Yvonne Rainer, another to the point of land the further east in North America.
Linklater’s simultaneity of various references, of which this is only a partial list, obliterates ordered notions of identity, while being faithful to his own biography, aesthetic and heritage. Born in 1976, artist Omaskêko Cree, from the Moose Cree First Nation, was educated in Timmins, a small town in northern Ontario, where he took up punk rock and skateboarding. His mother was born in a teepee in territory accessible by plane; his maternal grandparents lived in the bush until they were sent to one of the notorious boarding schools. Linklater, who holds an MFA from Bard College and currently lives in North Bay, Ont., with his wife, artist Alutiiq/Sugpiak Tanya Lukin Linklaterand their three children, recounts these and other details in the exhibition catalog via interviews with his maternal aunt, Irene Linklater, and grandmother, Agnes Hunter, as well as photographs taken at home by his teenage daughter, Sassa.
This emphasis on the importance of family and community, so rare in the art world, explains both the title of the exhibition and some of the more social aspects of Linklater’s materials. His teepee cover paintings—sewn-together semi-circles of linen panels up to 20 feet in diameter and featuring picket loops, center smoke flaps, and door cutouts; printed with pre-contact geometric patterns and the European floral patterns that largely replaced them; and alternately displayed folded, suspended or draped – are colored with dyes derived from sumac, dandelion, black walnut, iron oxide and other regionally sourced minerals and pigments, as presented by the artist ojibwe Anong beam. The poles of saplings used in the monumental sculpture ‘what grief conjures up’ – at its center stands the hooded statue, atop the green refrigerator, atop a devil, atop a shipping pallet – were harvested and prepared with the help of friends affiliated with Dokis First Nation; a video, not on view at the MCA, shows family members moving through the middle of the structure to a score composed by the artist and his son, Tobias. The coyote pelt hanging on a clothes rack in “The Place I’m Looking to Go” was purchased from Fur Harvesters Auction, a long-established business in North Bay where Linklater’s grandparents once sold furs and where his extended family members continue to do so. “Modest Livelihood,” a silent, slow-moving meditative film that will play during the second half of the show on the wall above the gallery entrance/exit, follows artist Linklater and Dane-Zaa Brian Jungen hunting moose with Jungen’s uncle, Elder Jack Askoty, on Dane-Zaa territory in northern British Columbia.
“Sunrise at Cape Spear,” the video played throughout the first half of the show, also engages with the community — but one community is long gone. The visuals are simple, just waves crashing on the rocky shore of a headland at daybreak, but the location is anything but: the tip of Newfoundland, indeed the entire continent, it was originally inhabited. by the Beothuk, who were forced to migrate inland gradually expanding European settlement and declared extinct in 1829. After re-occupying their place, Linklater attempted to use this fact to counter the lack of meaningful language on indigenous peoples on the Cape Spear Wikipedia page. THE ensuing dispute between him, the site admins and other volunteer editors about the appropriateness of his addition to the page – he was repeatedly deleted and eventually – would be comical if he weren’t so revealing of the systemic ways in which prospects natives have been removed.
Linklater manifests the violence perpetrated against Indigenous North Americans by Western institutions in the most explicit way – with a mixture of composure and emotion – in projects that respond to how Indigenous artifacts have long been collected by strangers. What’s here are the most ghostly, crappy copies: off-white ABS plastic versions of masks, jars, a figurine and a mini totem of a crop hodgepodge, marred by stitching, doubled by the mirrored surfaces of the tables on which they are stored. The originals, belonging to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, have undergone excruciatingly typical practices: individual authorship never recorded, objects considered animated by their tribes stored as dead, diverse cultures grouped into simplistic cultural categories. Linklater’s bad copies won’t comfort anyone, nor should they register the alienation and loss that museums and collectors have long perpetrated in their quest for interesting objects.
my mother, which debuted at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, has the distinction of being the MCA’s first solo exhibition dedicated to an Indigenous artist. It’s long overdue, and nicely complemented by two terrific smaller shows simultaneously in Chicago: Marie Watt: The Sky Dances Lighta wonderful exhibition of jingle-cone cloud sculptures by artist Seneca, at Kavi Gupta Gallery, and Brenda Draney: Drinking from the River, a study of the stripped-down, dreamlike canvases of the Sawridge First Nation painter, at the Arts Club of Chicago. But solo exhibitions alone cannot provide all the missing Indigenous voices in American art history – for that, successful Indigenous-led surveys are indispensable. And they’re coming in both book and exhibit form: In August, DelMonico Books/BIG NDN Press will publish An indigenous present, a breathtaking 448-page book edited by Choctaw-Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson featuring works by more than 60 contemporary Indigenous creators, as well as artist interviews, essays and texts. Then, at the end of September, The Earth Bears Our Ancestors: Contemporary Native American Art will open at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, curated by veteran Yellow Salish/Kootenai Nation artist Quick-to-See Smith. May the buckskin ceiling be forever unbroken.
my mother continues at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) through September 3. The exhibition was curated by Amanda Donnan, Chief Curator at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, and curated at the MCA by Carla Acevedo-Yates with Iris Colburn.
