In a dialog with Duane Linklater printed within the brochure for his present exhibition, 12 + 2, at Dia Chelsea, filmmaker and scholar Tasha Hubbard (Peepeekisis First Nation) distills the intertwined erasures effected underneath colonialism in North America. Over the course of the nineteenth century, parallel to the systematic literal and cultural genocide of Native individuals, settlers killed tens of millions of buffalo, until there remained just a few hundred; even now, when different massive recreation populations are rebounding as a part of free-ranging herds, buffalo are for essentially the most half solely allowed on personal land, nationwide parks, or reservations. “Indigenous individuals and buffalo are conflated within the settler thoughts and have been from the start; we’re buffalo, and they’re us,” she stated. “And so, identical to settler colonialism wants Indigenous individuals to be constrained and contained, it’s the identical for buffalo.”
Linklater not solely lets buffalo run free in 12 + 2, conceptually no less than, however within the set up, efficiency, and work on view he additionally reimagines the world of their phrases. Given the mutual identification, coexistence, and interdependence between Native individuals and the species throughout millennia, the transfer is an act of imagining the Earth in and thru a lens of Indigeneity. Seven of the beasts, which the artist customary out of wire and papier-mâché earlier than scaling them as much as two or 3 times their pure dimension, make themselves at dwelling in two huge galleries (collectively they’re titled “wallowposition”). Their faceted planes and visual seams the place parts join give them a barely robot-like look. They’re eyeless, featureless actually, coated in dun-colored plaster that mimics mud. However they’re additionally vivid, animate, and expressive — cute, even. One kneels on its entrance legs, maybe consuming water. One other has plopped itself on its aspect, legs flailing within the air. Yet one more, an adolescent with lengthy legs and a head smaller than the remainder, appears to be caught mid-trot, whereas a child sploots on the ground.
They’re wallowing: rolling within the grime, eliminating critters on their coats, cooling off, smelling smells, choosing up grass seeds that may fall off their our bodies later, making certain the unfold of prairie grasses and brush. It’s an instinctual, pleasurable habits during which, in line with curator Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, the animals don’t indulge underneath situations of captivity or duress.
What does it take for buffalo to be at dwelling, to be in an atmosphere the place they can’t merely survive — which they’ve achieved regardless of one of the best efforts of American colonizers — however thrive? And by extension, what does it take for these sculpted buffalo, made by an artist who’s Omasekêko Ininiwak from Moose Cree First Nation, to be at dwelling on this artwork establishment?
Linklater undertakes a strategy of worldbuilding at Dia, a basis that has traditionally supported artists (Smithson, Holt, De Maria, Heizer) who as typically as not did not register that the land they co-opted as web site and materials was and is homeland to Native individuals. The inspiration, furthermore, occupies an industrial area constructed upon layers and layers of historical past and topography, together with Lenape tobacco fields. Linklater remaps the Chelsea area not solely by turning it right into a digital prairie, marked out by the presence of buffalo, but additionally by extracting 12 cylindrical cores from the ground and substrate and changing them with soil and granite discs from close to his dwelling in Northern Ontario. Two different boreholes stay empty, coated with glass so guests can see what’s under. The 12 items of granite, organized in a circle that transverses the 2 rooms, along with the 2 boreholes (the “12 + 2” of the piece’s title and that of the exhibition as a complete), mark out the pole placement of a teepee, an association with cosmological significance — yet one more type of mapping; certainly one of Linklater’s cochineal-stained, charcoal-marked teepee covers, “parliament,” hangs from the rafters within the second gallery. The dug-up slag and concrete are offered in a metal trough close by. The intervention recollects Robert Smithson’s “non-sites,” for which he introduced supplies like coal and rocks gathered from industrial wastelands in New Jersey and elsewhere into the gallery, connecting the white field to the skin world and to each the current and a deep geological previous. However as an alternative of merely bringing the skin in, Linklater additionally drills down, forcing us to take care of a really human-scaled chronology of displacement.
Regardless of his buffaloes’ monumentality, Linklater preserves the galleries’ huge openness to accommodate the work’s essential efficiency part. On Saturdays afternoons, “bison bison (dance_hum for dirtbath)” takes place, written and choreographed by the artist Tanya Lukin Linklater, Duane Linklater’s spouse and frequent collaborator. Over the course of 44 minutes, dancers tempo across the room, experiencing this digital panorama the way in which buffalo may. At occasions they undertake actions meant to honor or map it, as when a performer makes charcoal rubbings of the granite plugs within the flooring. Their actions drive the music, “buffalounit,” composed by eagleswitheyesclosed (a collaboration between Linklater and his son Tobias) and performed by a drummer, cellist, and bass guitarist. Over seven weeks, the variety of dancers and musicians will winnow away, ending with a single percussionist and a single determine in movement.
Rendered in oil stick, paint, and graphite on three panels, “kitaskînaw_kitaskînawâw (each indian I do know hates that track)” — the track within the title is, I believe, the basic anthem of westward growth, “House on the Vary” — recollects the historical past of summary portray by means of its gestural strokes in pink, white, and blue (plus touches of browns and beige) and dimension (it measures round 11 by 6.5 ft). However the marks additionally coalesce right into a duck-rabbit picture of a buffalo laying on its aspect and a tough map of the North American continent. Within the different gallery is “wallowwallow,” a round kind product of soil, hay, clay, and brown, grey, and blue pigment on metal and surrounded by a halo utilized on to the brick wall. It’s meant to recommend the hollows the buffalo make as they roll round on the soil, reshaping the panorama as they go, nevertheless it additionally reads because the Earth seen from area. Linklater ties the well-being of his buffalo to that of the Indigenous individuals with whom they’ve lengthy lived symbiotically — and even to that of the world itself — not in nostalgic phrases however in futurist ones by way of robotic buffalos and titles that recommend pc file names. As a complete, 12 + 2 appears to level us to an vital fact: We stay in a world that buffalo create.
Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 continues at Dia Chelsea (537 West twenty second Road, Chelsea, Manhattan) by means of January 24, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi.
