From Edmonton Arts Council: mikikwan is a concrete reproduction of a 9,000-year-old buffalo bone hide scraper from the archives of the Royal Alberta Museum.
The artist chose the bone as his source material because of the many meanings, ideas, histories, narratives, languages and cultures embedded within it. The finished sculpture will memorialize the work of Indigenous women and the relation of that labour to the land. The sculpture also pays respect to the importance of the buffalo itself to the people living in this place, the communal aspect of its use, and its destruction with the arrival of Europeans on the Plains.
Artist Bio: Duane Linklater is Omaskêko Cree, from Moose Cree First Nation in Northern Ontario and is currently based in North Bay, Ontario. Duane attended the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College in upstate New York, USA, completing his Master of Fine Arts in Film and Video. He has exhibited and screened his work nationally and internationally at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Family Business Gallery in New York City, Te Tuhi Centre for Arts Auckland, New Zealand, City Arts Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland, Institute of Contemporary Arts Philadelphia and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City.
His collaborative film project with Brian Jungen, Modest Livelihood, was originally presented at the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre as a part of dOCUMENTA (13) with subsequent exhibitions of this work at the Logan Centre Gallery at the University of Chicago, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. In 2013, Duane received the Sobey Art Award given to an artist under 40.