TANYA LUKIN LINKLATER AND TIFFANY SHAW
My mind is with the weather
25 FEBRUARY 2023 - 23 APRIL 2023
As individual artists and collaborators, Tanya Lukin Linklater and Tiffany Shaw contend with structural violence towards Indigenous relations and knowledges. Whether through architecture, video, performance, or craft, both artists gather from the practices of everyday life: song, breath, and movement, situating bodily gestures as continual actions of defiance and rebuilding.
Indigenous geometries, a central artwork of the exhibition, is a mobile and temporary structure that references the Alutiiq (southern coastal Alaska Native) homes of Lukin Linklater’s birthplace. A collaborative piece between both artists, Indigenous geometries is a modular architecture composed of spine-like curves of bent wood. Several of the wood spines lie on the floor, recalling the institutional dismantling of Indigenous social structures. The displaced spines rest in anticipation of the energy required for Indigenous communities to re-assemble languages, families, and selves. Throughout the exhibition, Indigenous geometries will be periodically activated by Blackfoot singers, asserting the connections between song, home, and resilience.
Lukin Linklater’s video, This moment an endurance to the end forever accompanies Indigenous geometries. Within the video, two spines from Indigenous geometries appear in Lukin Linklater’s home, a counter-stroke to the Canadian and US federal policies that have worked to dismantle Indigenous families. The video expands to consider the envelopes of atmosphere and gravity surrounding the earth. Structuring the video around the cycle of a single day, dancers feel the tones and qualities of their breath in the atmosphere as it expands ever outwards. Considering craft as an index of gesture and memory, Tiffany Shaw will present a new installation titled …and other unseen forces, a continuation of the title of the exhibition and its consideration of body and atmosphere.
This exhibition has been organised in collaboration with Oakville Galleries and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. An exhibition catalogue with new writing is due to be published in the Spring of 2023.
Curated by Adam Whitford, Interim Curator
Tanya Lukin Linklater works across dance, performance, video, photography, installation, and writing. Her forthcoming and recent exhibitions include the 14th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Aichi Triennale, Japan; Chicago Architecture Biennial; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; National Gallery of Canada; Oakville Galleries; New Museum Triennial, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Wexner Center for the Arts Artist Residency Award and The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Slow Scrape, her first book of poetry, was published by The Centre for Expanded Poetics and Anteism, Montréal (2020) with a second edition published by Talonbooks, Vancouver (2022). She studied at Stanford University, University of Alberta, and Queen’s University. Her Sugpiaq homelands are in southwestern Alaska, and she lives and works in Nbisiing Anishinaabeg aki in Ontario.
Tiffany Shaw is a Métis architect, artist and curator based in Alberta. She holds a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University, a Masters in Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and is currently working at Reimagine Architects. Shaw has exhibited widely including the Architecture Venice Biennale, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Pier 21, Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Chicago Architecture Biennial. She has been the recipient of multiple public art commissions such as Edmonton's Indigenous Art Park and Winnipeg’s Markham Bus Station. Among her public art projects Tiffany has produced several notable transitory art works and is a core member of Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective.
This exhibition was made possible with funding assistance from the City of Lethbridge, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.