REVIEW: Making Spaces in the Museums: on Duane Linklater’s “mymotherside” at the MCA Chicago

Duane Linklater, The place I seek to go, 2014. Coyote fur, garment rack, hanger, flat screen TV, mac mini, HD video loop, cables; 132 × 66 × 20 in. (335 × 168 × 52 cm). Collection of Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Purchased with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Grants program, 2016. Photo: SITE Photography, courtesy of Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver.

REVIEW
Duane Linklater
mymotherside
MCA Chicago
220 E. Chicago Ave.
Chicago, IL 60611
March 11th - September 3, 2023

By Xiao daCunha

We visit the reservation sites like we do an Amish market or an off-grid homestead, occasionally striking up a curious conversation with an elder sitting in the shades. We feel good.

We stroll through the Art Institute’s limited collection of indigenous art and archives, fabricating a deep connection with the history of the original owners of the land we reside on. We leave. We continue our day.

Indigenous art has been invisible for far too long due to institutional negligence and discrimination. The idea that those who have always lived on this continent were not only rid of their homes and possessions but also their voices and culture was truly heartbreaking. It almost felt like an entire population was frozen in time: living human beings are regarded like stills in a photo book, and their organic culture was documented via dead artifacts. Indigenous communities were indeed cast aside like a historical subject: we learned about their sufferings and settlers’ brutalities, and we moved on while the people lived on.

mymotherside, on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago through September 3, 2023, is a comprehensive display of works created by artist Duane Linklater, whose practice interrogates how museums and their conventions erased indigenous culture’s presence while brings the unfiltered, ongoing narratives of indigenous life to the front stage via a wide range of mediums.

For the past ten years, Ontario-based Omaskêko Cree artist Linklater has been untelling stories told by settler-colonial structures to reveal an alternative indigenous culture and experience. Using language, textiles, monuments, and icons as his building blocks, Linklater creates an intimate monologue explaining indigenous culture, land, and people, as well as how the community interacts with and adapts into a settler-dominating world.

 Installation view, Duane Linklater: mymothersside, MCA Chicago, Mar 11–Sep 3, 2023. Photo: Tom Van Eynde.

Upon entering the museum space, visitors were greeted by a giant, uncovered tipi sheltering a hooded figure standing on top of a refrigerator on a wood pallet. Stripped naked to its bare bones, the tipi skeleton stares at the visitors in calmness and tranquility, whereas the hooded figure looks much similar to a sacrifice on an altar. All that was missing was a fire.

In the piece “what grief conjures,” Linklater deconstructed the most universal indigenous cultural symbol known by the public: the tipi, and merged its structure with some of the most basic modern elements: a pink hoodie, a fridge, and a construction pallet as a way to indicate indigenous culture’s diverse nature, which is often erased from the public’s vision and over-simplified by popular icons like the tipi, feathered headdresses, and traditional clothing.

Nonetheless, the exhibition exceeds beyond merely tearing things down, for Linklater constructed as many meaningful messages and imageries as the ones he interrogated. If anything, the exhibition made spaces by removing settler system knowledge and definition to make space for real experiences to enter the horizon.

In The place I seek to go, a coyote pelt is displayed on a clothing rack, carrying the artist’s hunting and fur trading ancestry. Below, a flat-screen TV plays an HD Video loop composed of various hand movements Linklater developed during his childhood to hide an injured finger. On the ground, winding power cords and cables tangled like lurking snakes, casting an uncomfortable omniscient presence. It made you wonder where the artist sought to go, as the coyote, a once free and fierce spirit, now reduced to pelt, as the child consciously hid his damaged finger, and as ancestry collides with the contemporary and tradition conflicts with settlers’ values. Has the artist arrived at his Shangri la? Perhaps. Or, perhaps, he is still on the search, adapting and navigating the unfamiliar world with his culture and heritage on his shoulders, constructing the place he seeks to go.

Duane Linklater, can the circle be unbroken 2 (detail), 2019. Digital print on linen, iron red dye, cypress yellow ochre, blueberry extract, charcoal, nails, 120 x 240 inches. Commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, courtesy the artist and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver / Photo: Glenn Cheriton.

Finally, Linklater sheds light on the Western mishandling of artifacts ubiquitous in museums and other institutions by displaying an assortment of indigenous artifacts on top of mirrored tables. Through direct reflections, Linklater puts on full blast how the ignorance and brutality of our cultural institutions have played a significant role in the myth of indigenous extinction. By removing these man-made misconceptions, the artist then made space for raw emotions, unfiltered experiences, and intimate narratives to come through.

In the Can the circle be broken series, Linklater printed various images onto tipi fabrics, including indigenous plants, geometric patterns from uncredited Navajo textiles, and images significant to the artist’s personal experience. In the video Sunrise at Cape Spear, Linklater and collaborator Katinka Kleijn combine “Santu’s Song,” a fragment of a tune remembered by a Beothuk woman, and Cape Spear’s sunrise to reinstate the presence of the Beothuk, Newfoundland’s Indigenous inhabitants — a population our scholars falsely believed to have perished.

To be honest, it is challenging to do Duane Linklater justice with the few pieces on display at mymotherside, as his practice carries such eloquence and sophistication. It is also near impossible to look at each piece as separate creations. Rather, all pieces weave together a fresh narrative of unfiltered indigenous life that slowly comes into existence. Through inheritance and acceptance, perseverance and adaptation, the indigenous life continues to thrive, grow, and evolve regardless of the common myth of extinction. And for anyone belonging to a community whose culture and history have been erased or misrepresented by cultural institutions, Linklater showed us a way to remove obsolete misrepresentations so we make space for new possibilities — after all, you must break down the existing walls to build a refreshed and united space.

Ultimately, the exhibition proves the possibility of building a renewed relationship between cultural institutions and indigenous people or any other population that has been traditionally absent due to museum conventions and practices. Standing under the tipi cover draped from the poles mounted onto the wall, I felt a wave of reassurance I hadn’t felt for a long time. It was the reassurance of existence. It was the validation of experience.

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