Duane Linklater: mymothersside

Edited by Amanda Donnan

This catalogue is published by the Frye Art Museum in conjunction with its exhibition Duane Linklater: mymothersside, the artist’s first major survey exhibition. An essay by Frye Chief Curator Amanda Donnan offers a timely assessment of the artist’s work over the last decade and conversations between the artist and elder family members function as an alternative form of scholarship, producing what the artist calls “generative approximations” in parallel with his work. Interspersed with photographs taken by his daughter, the catalogue presents an expansive constellation of references and intergenerational relationships that enriches understanding of Linklater’s practice and of contemporary art at large. The book is fully illustrated with examples of the artist’s body of work, including site-responsive architectural interventions, large-scale structures made with tepee poles, digital prints on linen, videos, and installations.

Softcover, 128 pages
6.5 x 9.5 in.

Duane Linklater (Omaskêko Cree, b. 1976, Treaty 9 territory, Canada) lives and works in North Bay, Ontario. He often uses appropriated imagery, lo-fi methods of reproduction, and commercial materials in his work, challenging dominant Euro-American notions of ownership and authenticity. These concerns and strategies have frequently coalesced in explorations of the physical and ideological structures of the museum, especially as they relate to the display (and marginalization) of Indigenous histories. In 2011, Linklater initiated Wood Land School, a nomadic, collaborative project that centers Indigenous forms and ideas in the institutional spaces the school inhabits.

Linklater earned a BFA in Fine Art and Native Studies from the University of Alberta in 2005 and an MFA in Film and Video from the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College in 2012. He has presented solo exhibitions at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, Lansing (2017); 80 WSE Gallery, New York City, and Mercer Union, Toronto (2016); and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2015). Recently, Linklater’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Artists Space, New York City, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2019); the High Line, New York City (2018); the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2017); and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2015), among others. He was the 2016 recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for Media Art and the 2013 Sobey Art Award winner.