How many people does it take to put on a solo exhibition? When I visit akâmi-, the Omaskêko Ininiwak artist Duane Linklater’s show at Camden Art Centre, three technicians are packing up their tools as a photographer takes installation shots. The show was curated by this year’s New Curators fellows, a group of 11 aspiring exhibition makers. It includes work by Linklater’s son and grandmother as well as his wife, Tanya Lukin Linklater, with whom he works under the moniker Grey Plumes. As we approach twenty contributors, I wonder whether the term solo exhibition might be inaccurate.
Throughout the show, Linklater playfully questions the idea of singular authorship that underpins the art world and, in many ways, defines our understanding of culture. His message, uniting the three disparate bodies of work on show here, is as clear and simple as it is defiant. His name might top the press release, but it’s not his show; it takes a village.
The first room contains a series of arresting, moody canvases awash with the colours of plums, sand and sunsets. Though spartan, they provide plenty to look at. Many are irregular in shape and comprise multiple sheets of linen sewn together. Some are painted with disembodied ornate window frames while others contain rorschach-like splatters. You might imagine Linklater alone in his studio, mixing the colours that make these haunting images, but you’d be wrong. They’re painted with natural materials including tea, sumac and tobacco: in other words, made in collaboration with both the land and the now-anonymous people who extracted and packaged them. The architectural features reference a chapel in Ontario, built using forced indigenous labour. In material and subject, they needle the idea that an image or object can be created by one individual.
You’ll find yourself lost in the beauty of this installation
Next door, this line of questioning is brought to bear more explicitly. On plywood plinths that emanate the smell of the workshop they came from, Linklater has arranged a disparate cast of objects. Garments made by his grandmother and a stop motion video by his son sit alongside tobacco flowers and cigarette packets, all arranged on concrete and metal armatures made by Linklater himself. You’ll likely find yourself too lost in the beauty of this installation, both delicate and brutal, to wonder who made it. That’s just as well, because there’s no clear answer to that question.
Entering the third room, which contains a series of clay vessels by Grey Plumes made to resemble a 500-year-old pot excavated in 1962 from Tanya Lukin Linklater’s homelands in Alaska, I imagine myself surrounded by everyone who, in some sense, ‘made’ this exhibition. From curators to craftspeople, artists to artisans; credited and uncredited, visible and invisible. The room is filling up quickly.
If you’re looking for a cohesive narrative or point of view, you won’t find it here. akâmi- isn’t a solo exhibition at all. It’s an open-ended assemblage from which a commentary emerges on what’s lost when we try to assign an object a single maker or owner. It’s a pertinent point made powerfully by a diverse chorus of voices.
