Linklater, Duane

Duane Linklater is an Omaskêko Ininiwak visual artist whose practice interrogates the physical and theoretical structures of museums in relation to their exclusion or flattened representation of Indigenous people, objects, and aesthetics. He works in a myriad of forms—including sculpture, photography, film, installation, and text—to address the contradictions of contemporary Indigenous life in the wake of history. Linklater’s work asks questions beyond colonized systems of knowledge, representation, and value to defy reductive notions of identity and art.

In the MoCP permanent collection, Erratics (2017) is a set of found photographs of centuries-old rock outcroppings displayed in plastic bags. Some of the images depict rocks on their own and others with white tourists posing on them. The contrast between the massive timescale of geological erosion with the immediacy of the tourists’ encounters with the rocks calls into question the colonized perspective of land ownership. “It is an interesting proposition to think that these stones are still moving…having witnessed so much change since the arrival of settlers,” Linklater said about the piece. “Perhaps it is the people surrounding them which are erratic.” The piece was a part of the exhibition Determined by the river which was shown at the Remai Modern in 2017.

Duane Linklater holds a Bachelor of Native Studies and a BFA (2005) from University of Alberta as well as an MFA (2012) in video and film from Bard College. He has won the Sobey Art Award (2013) and the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award from the Canada Council for the Arts (2016). Linklater’s work has been exhibited by Art Gallery of Ontario; Utah Museum of Fine Arts; Frye Museum, Seattle; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and various others.