Catriona Jeffries

This exhibition presents new and recent work by Tanya Lukin Linklater. Working across a range of media, including choreographed dance performances, video, sculptural installation and text, the artist's practice considers the troubled colonial histories of Turtle Island and the structural violences Indigenous communities continue to withstand.

Born in the Kodiak archipelago of Alaska, Lukin Linklater has lived and worked in Nbisiing Anishinaabek territory in northern Ontario for more than a decade. For this, her first solo exhibition at a public museum, she is showing two recent films, a sculptural installation, which was developed with the artist and architect Tiffany Shaw, and her most recent film, which draws from a highly autobiographical text included in her book of poems Slow Scrape (2020).

With these works she considers how colonialism is registered and processed in the body and highlights moments of resistance. These come from working with others as an anticolonial strategy, thoughtfully addressing the tensions and complexities of her presence as an Alutiiq artist working within art institutional settings such as the museum, and a focus on the power and importance of certain practices of everyday life, such as sound, dance, language, kinship, breath, silence, and song.

Underlying the work is a considered intention on the artist's part to foster an ethic of generosity, care, and responsibility towards self, others, and the natural world. Rooted in Alutiiq traditions, this way of working presents a vitally important means of protection—a means to withstand continuing erasures and work towards processes of wellbeing and repair.

Documentation by LF Documentation.