an MCA exhibition review
something a little different for this week! Duane Linklater: mymothersside (2023) goes until 9/3.
Today, I’m sharing an exhibition review of Duane Linklater: mymothersside (2023) which I saw last month at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago :) Let me know what you think!
A Necessary Haunting: Reviewing Duane Linklater: mymothersside (2023)
Drawing from a rich body of references including pop culture, history, and family, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) exhibition Duane Linklater: mymothersside (2023) is an ambitious presentation of artist Duane Linklater’s past decade of works that span sculpture, photography, and video. First exhibited at the Frye Museum of Art in Seattle, the MCA presentation highlights Linklater's interest in deconstructing, interrogating, and reassembling one of the most ubiquitous symbols of Indigenous identity—the tipi. Most of all, I see Linklater’s embrace of absences as initiating a provocative haunting of the museum in concept. And by haunting, I mean to get at the ways I think Linklater’s work collapses linear time and instead invites an intermingling of the past, present, and future. The exhibition lobbies an effective form of institutional critique—Linklater’s works demand space, and challenge the museum’s physical boundaries even as they are presented within that very same context.
Born in 1976, Duane Linklater is an Omaskêko Ininiwak artist, who currently lives and works in North Bay, Ontario. The artist’s personal background informs their concerns on the contradictions of contemporary Indigenous life both within and beyond settler systems of knowledge, representation, and value. Linklater’s artist statement describes: “Linklater’s practice is concerned in part with the exploration of the physical and theoretical structures of the museum in relation to the current and historical conditions of Indigenous people and their objects and forms” (Linklater 2023). Linklater is invested in how the physical and theoretical structures of the museum as an institution intersect, overlap, and at times, bleed together.
And bleed together they do. A core idea of museum studies is examining how museums perpetuate power and knowledge through seemingly neutral physical and theoretical structures—institutional silences and impermeable white walls. Yet the sociopolitical and historical reality is anything but. Museums are fallible and subjective spaces. Museums make meaning through their choices: which artistic canons they present, how exhibitions are organized, and whom they deem worthy of being presented in their hallowed spaces.
In the past decade or so, we’ve seen museums begin to reckon with their roles in erasure—and acute physical, temporal, and theoretical violence contained in that—of Indigenous life, culture, and art-making. Some of these institutional attempts are tokenizing, superficial, or non-existent; and at best, imaginative, self-aware, and reciprocal partnerships between artists and institutions. But how can artists of marginalized backgrounds participate in these exhibitions, while simultaneously drawing attention to the contingencies of an institutional welcome?
When I arrived at the exhibition, I was greeted by an immense cavern of white space, replete with slate-gray linoleum floors, illuminated by overhead lights. There are few didactic texts or no concealed sightlines, and as a result, the bare walls are particularly striking—the space is a model white cube. The space didn’t appear to undergo a physical transformation for the exhibition’s presentation and looked hyper-mimetic of the white-walled museum as an institution model, so much so, it seemed almost critical of that idea. As a result, Linklater’s large-scale installations, prints, and sculptures are free to take up all the space they choose, which they rightfully do.
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On the rightmost wall, can the circle be unbroken 1–5, 2019, a digital print on linen, made me think of naturalistic botanical illustrations, the impression of found fabrics, but I couldn’t isolate the work with a specific place or time, due to its patchworked quality. Instead, the different panels collage together something new—a tattooed back, a prophecy, a story. While the tipi, a traditional Cree home, is one of the most distinctive forms of Indigenous architecture, it has also become a stereotyped catch-all to represent Indigenous identity. Here, Linklater manipulates a tipi’s semicircular fabric cover to create a new support for digitally printed images instead. The resulting linen prints seem to reference the Euro-American fixation with the traditional canvas, and that canon which glorifies the white male artists who subvert those same conventions. Once a discreet wall label alerted me to how Linklater’s tapestries reference the tipi’s architecture, I couldn’t stop seeing the invisible presence, or ‘ghost’ as I term it, of the tipi in both form and concept. The tapestries also drape onto the floors, and represent one of Linklater’s many resurrections of the tipi.
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In other places, Linklater’s references to the tipi feel more explicit. In what grief conjures (2020), tipi poles surround a vintage refrigerator atop a wooden pallet. A plastic statue, in the style of Greco-Roman sculpture, and dressed in a hand-painted hoodie dyed with cochineal stands atop the refrigerator. The sculpture evokes a shrine, idol, and totem of sorts, but again, the emotional effect of the work feels entangled, ambivalent. The anachronistic classical statue looks humbled in its new garment, and the refrigerator is a phased-out model. The refrigerator was also bound and shut, as if suspended within a liminal state of eternal packing-up, moving, and displacement even. The sculpture was saturated with the presence of absence. The crowning tipi poles lacked their cover, and as for the refrigerator—what was inside of it? The refrigerator adopted a Schrödinger's cat—I couldn’t see what was inside of it to know if the cat, if there was one, was alive or dead, so whatever the refrigerator contained became both alive and dead.
While many of Linklater’s artworks evoke and reassemble the tipi’s form—no work ever becomes the historical tipi of visitors’ preconceptions. Instead, Linklater’s inquiries are constructed in ways that cleverly invoke their referent, but are left in the in-between of partial being, not-being, and also being something new. Through this, I think Linklater’s works reject a re-enchantment of Indigenous life, or lives. Instead, the artworks navigate the in-betweenness of the tipi as a concept, signifier, and identity of what may no longer be architecturally viable, but is constantly recurring in present-day phantasmagoric echoes. In the exhibition, Linklater has opened up a necessary wound for the ‘haunting’ of the museum as an institution. If the ‘tipi,’ in one sense of settler colonial history is dead, gone, or could never really exist within that framework, where does everything that its become laden with go? Where can its presence go? What can the tipi become?
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In other parts of the exhibition, Linklater answers—the tipi, as one stand-in for Indigenous identities, multiplicities, and contradictions, can and should go everywhere. Linklater’s artworks are hung in unconventional ways that draw visitors’ attention to the exhibition’s spatial boundaries. Aside the entrance, a series of four digital prints there’s really only so much I can do and say (2017) begin at the base of the floor and ascend to the ceiling. On the far wall, three massive hand-dyed linen Tipi covers (2018) unfurl unapologetically. The largest tipi-like sculpture shoots out from a side wall, manifesting a site-specific commentary on breaking institutional confines, both physical and theoretical. In other areas of the exhibition, Linklater’s engagement with the space is subtle, but is no less noticeable—for one, the installation landlesscolumnbundle (2019) displaces several of the overhead lights on the ceiling due to its height. Here, the museum must accommodate the artist, and the new space that they demand. These moments made me imagine: what if the ceiling was to be knocked down? Why shouldn’t a tipi protrude from the wall? Or, what if the tipi was there all along? In Duane Linklater: mymothersside, I felt the presence of the erased, absent, and ghostly. These forces will take up space, and speak—whether they are invited or not.
Duane Linklater: mymothersside (2023) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago runs until September 3, 2023. Click here to learn more. Go see it!
Note: A previous version of the above review was submitted as a final academic paper.