Moose Cree artist explores relationship between humans and animals in cities

Moose Cree artist Duane Linklater is raising concerns about the environment through his video art exhibition: Something About Encounter.
“It’s important for us to think about our relationship with animals, and if we think about our relationship with animals, we think about our relationship with nature,” Linklater said during his April 12 opening reception for the April 13 - May 19 exhibition at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery. “Especially in Canada right now, or in North America or anywhere else in the world for that matter, I think it’s important for us to think about our environment and the effect that we have on the environment.”
Linklater said the current way of life is not sustainable.
“These sort of environmental concerns that people are having are very legitimate and very real,” Linklater said. “We should think about that and talk about that and maybe this is one way we can.”
Linklater’s exhibition features iPhone video clips of his encounters with a variety of animals, including coyotes, rabbits, geese and deer, in urban environments across Canada.
“At this point there’s footage from Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Banff,” Linklater stated in the exhibition catalogue. “The works are videos of animals that I see and maybe even engage with somehow that have been documented using my iPhone. It is the quickest way of video-recording nowadays.”
Linklater began the project by capturing a coyote in Vancouver as a way to document “the moment” that was happening in front of him.
“I thought the moment talked about a lot of things all at once,” Linklater said. “It has a lot to do with the relationships of cities to its surroundings and boundaries, and of the idea of maybe the animals not caring about those things. For the animals it is maybe sort of a new survival for them.”
Linklater noted that wild animals seem to be wandering into urban environments in most cities.
“Sometimes they’re like everyday kinds of things, like I saw a moose one time, ha ha,” Linklater said. “But other times we might have been alone and this animal might have appeared out of nowhere and it might have had some kind of significant sort of interaction (with us).”
Linklater recalled an emotional encounter he and another driver had with a deer a few years ago in Edmonton, Alta.
“This car just abruptly stopped in front of me, and the driver ran out,” Linklater said. “I got out to help him — I didn’t know what happened — and he had hit a baby deer. He lifted up this deer like it was a child and he was crying because he felt so bad.”
Linklater called for people to continue raising environmental concerns, noting recent protests by Idle No More and Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence.
“If we think about our environment, we are thinking ahead of ourselves, our children or our children’s children or our children’s children’s children, to make sure that environment is still there when it’s time for us to leave,” Linklater said. “I think in the videos, that maybe the showing up of animals in the urban environment are little symptoms of our expansion of the urban. The urban is always growing and growing and it’s overlapping with flight migrations and habitats of animals.”
Linklater said that polar bears have started entering his grandmother’s community of Peawanuck, on the Hudson Bay coast.
“These animals, by their actions because they can’t really speak words like you and I, I think they can say things by their actions,” Linklater said. “By a coyote coming into the city, I think that’s saying something. I think it’s saying something on behalf of the environment, which the coyote comes from.”
Linklater’s work has been exhibited and screened at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Alberta, Family Business Gallery in New York City and the Power Plant in Toronto. He studied at the University of Alberta and completed his masters of fine arts in film and video at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College in upstate New York.