TANYA LUKIN LINKLATER
with Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Ceinwen Gobert, and Neven Lochhead
Vessel(s), 2021
4K video
6 minutes, 5 seconds
Tanya Lukin Linklater's artistic practice spans video, sculpture, and dance in museums. Sensation, embodied inquiry, scores, rehearsal, and being in relation (to ancestral belongings, communities, and weather) structure her work. Her work reckons with histories that affect Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences, (home)lands, and ideas.
Vessel(s) was shot in the summer of 2021 for Generous Acts at Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective in Edmonton, Alberta, an exhibition that brought together eight artists from various communities across Northwestern Turtle Island to offer a glimpse into the introspective process of thinking through the notion of care during the global pandemic. Vessel(s) exemplifies the way in which Lukin Linklater honours practices and lineages that exceed dominant ideas of who we are through the citation of Indigenous peoples' lived experience and cultural work.
Vessel(s) is a work for camera by Lukin Linklater with dancers Ivanie Aubin-Malo, Ceinwen Gobert and artist Neven Lochhead. Developed through a dispersed process across geographical locations and led through a set of written instructions and texts, Vessel(s) is a compilation of a series of concise performances for camera. Bodies roll, stretch and feel the hard texture of a brick wall, the crisp life of grass and the softness of a carpet, while text overlays provide an expansive understanding of what a vessel can be —“an edge of a vessel is a border, a side, a margin, frame or hem” —and ask “when does this edge or hem breathe?”. With the subtle and slow embodiment of these natural and built environments, another prompt reminds us how the body is a vessel that carries memory: “remember what it felt like…in this moment, one might ask what does it feel like when the outer edges of the vessel spill over?”. In the aftermath of the collective pause in everyday life that the shutdown of the pandemic forced upon everyone around the world, Lukin Linklater’s generative response offers a slow contemplative means to consider what fills us up and what spills us over.
Artist Biography
Tanya Lukin Linklater’s Sugpiaq homelands are in southwestern Alaska. She is a tribally enrolled member of the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in the Kodiak archipelago. Lukin Linklater’s (Alutiiq/Sugpiaq, b. 1976, Kodiak Island, USA; lives/works in North Bay, Ontario) practice encompasses dance, performance, video, photography, installation, and writing. Her works cite Indigenous dance and visual art lineages, our structures of sustenance, and weather. She undertakes embodied inquiry and rehearsal in relation to scores and ancestral belongings in museums and elsewhere.
Lukin Linklater’s notable solo and two-person exhibitions include Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio (2024); Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge (2023); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2022); Oakville Galleries, Canada (2022); Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2022); Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019); Remai Modern, Saskatoon (2017); and Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2016). Her group exhibitions include the 14th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2023); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2022); Aichi Triennale, Nagoya, Japan (2022); Toronto Biennial of Art (2022); New Museum Triennial, New York (2021); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2020); Heard Museum, Phoenix (2020); Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond (2020); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2018); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2017); Winnipeg Art Gallery (2017); and La Biennale de Montréal (2016).
Lukin Linklater received her PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University (2023), and holds a Master’s of Education from the University of Alberta (2003), and a Bachelor of Arts from Stanford University (1998). She is the 2021 recipient of The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, Visual Arts and in 2019 she received the Art Writing Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries. Slow Scrape, her first book of poetry, was published by The Centre for Expanded Poetics and Anteism (2020) with a second edition published by Talonbooks (2022).
Vessel(s), 2021
video still, 4K video
6 minutes, 5 seconds
photo courtesy of the artist and Catriona Jeffries Gallery