Duane Linklater: primaryuse at Catriona Jeffries, October 24 - November 24, 2020

The show is readable, and could have done with more room (it is almost a tradition for the gallery’s artists to test the spatial abundance/limits of the gallery). Which is not to say the show felt cramped, that moving through it had me watching my footing (that, too, is a desirable effect when need be). Any more room and that "third" tipi would have to be erected (too).

The lack of room suggested by the unassembled "third" tipi tells me the artist, like his peeps, needs more land -- as in all of it, as in returned, and that an art gallery is only a symbolic ground, not a literal one -- so a political space (or forum). The "crests" gathered on the "third" tipi's whitewashed Woodland poplar poles demonstrates an awareness of Eurowestern art history (Goya, Ackerman, Marker?), popular culture (Warhol's Edie) and their domestication (exotic house plants).

The passage of red paint and, like forest surveyor tape, pink paint is noted. The arrowheads lie like spent cursors -- the desk-led effort it took to distribute those reds and pinks -- the large spray-painted rectangle supplied under the artist's direction by a non-painting Haida artist and a Musqueam Salish cultural anthropologist(?). The wall-bound canvas tipi wraps are partially unbuttoned because they are ready, in motion, not because they look better that way.

The three-monitor installation primaryuse (2020) was for me the formal highlight, though it is hard to believe the figure walking stiffly through those unclothed tipis is a dancer. Unless that's the point -- that she was performing under duress. Curtis'ed, as it were. A salvage anthropology of the aequalis corporis. But by formal I mean the application of red paint onto the monitor screens, which reminded me of another gallery artist, Ian Wallace, his photo-paintings, the pairing of the pictured body with the painted monochrome. Wallace has urged us to think of the monochrome in his photo-paintings as a flaneurial derive space: where the subject has come from and, once pictured (seen), where they go from there. But no, I was told, the red paint is there to cover the non-pictured black space (made available through the transfer of 8mm film?). To what end, I don't know.

 

These are pretty much my notes, a record of my visit, taken at an opening only because there were people there that I didn't want to talk to. (The best defense a critic has in these situations is to be working.) Happy to report that the show remains inside me, capable of generating more -- and hopefully more thoughtful -- writing.