Duane Linklater

Duane Linklater presents eight sculptures made by copying selected unauthored artworks from the Native American Collection at the Utah Museum of Fine Art using 3D scanning and printing technologies. The original works, which embody the unique culture and characteristics of Native North Americans, from the Tsimshian, Kwakwaka’wakw, and Haida of the Northwest Coast of North America (now Canada) to the Rio Grande Pueblo and Santa Clara Pueblo of the American Southwest, are copied through the power of the new technology. This work allows us to read the complex issues of the past colonial era with regard to cultural artifacts being presented within the framework of current museum exhibitions, stripped of their original functional, ritualistic, and artistic context. Utah Museum of Fine Art curator Whitney Tassie has described the work as follows: “The data lost in this imperfect process echoes the names, stories, purposes, and meanings that are erased during an object’s cultural translation and ethnographic transformation in a museum. We assume museum presentations are factual and unbiased, but Duane Linklater’s installation encourages us to see the historical filters that shade exhibitions and our receptions of them.”