Artists in Conversation: Tanya Lukin Linklater and Raven Chacon

Tuesday, November 2, 2021 at 6:00pm
Zoom

FREE! RSVP required for access to virtual event.

This online event features artist Tanya Lukin Linklater in conversation with composer, performer, and installation artist Raven Chacon from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. The artists will discuss the concepts of the score as related to their work.

This event is held in conjunction with the exhibition The Language in Common, on display in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery from Tuesday, September 14 through Sunday, December 12, 2021. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday from Noon to 5pm. For more information and related events, visit the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery exhibition page.

Lukin Linklater draws upon documentary poetics, concrete-based installations, event scores, and other texts composed in relation to performances written between 2011 and 2018. Her book of poetry, Slow Scrape, cites memory, Cree and Alutiiq languages, and embodiment as modes of relational being and knowledge. The book unfolds a poetics of relation and action to counter the settler colonial violences of erasure, extraction, and dispossession. Slow Scrape can be read alongside Lukin Linklater’s practice as a visual artist and choreographer. Her performances, videos, installations, and writings work through orality and embodiment – investigating histories of Indigenous peoples’ lives, lands, and structures of sustenance. She has studied at Stanford University, the University of Alberta, and, presently, at Queen’s University, where she is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Studies. While Lukin Linklater's Alutiiq homelands are in southern Alaska (Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions), she has lived and worked in Nbisiing Anishnabek territory in northern Ontario, Canada for more than a decade. Slow Scrape is her first collection of poetry.

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, or with Postcommodity, Chacon has exhibited or performed at The Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, REDCAT, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center. Every year, he teaches 20 students to write string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project. He is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, the Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, and the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition.

RELATED EVENT
Poetry Reading by Tanya Lukin Linklater
Wednesday, October 6, 2021 at 4:30pm
Zoom
FREE! RSVP required for access to virtual event.

This online event features a poetry reading by Tanya Lukin Linklater. She will read from her first book, Slow Scrape (Anteism, 2020), which is, in the words of poet Layli Long Soldier, “an expansive and undulating meditation on time, relations, origin and colonization.”

This exhibition and related events are supported by the Shapiro Center and Writing at Wesleyan, the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, the Thomas and Catherine McMahon Fund of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the History Department, the Latin American Studies Program, Connecticut Humanities, and the Center for the Arts. Additional support by Etant donnés Contemporary Art, a program developed by FACE Foundation, Villa Albertine and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, with lead funding from the French Ministry of Culture and Institut Français-Paris, Ford Foundation, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Chanel USA, and ADAGP.

The general public will be welcomed back to Wesleyan this fall to enjoy Center for the Arts outdoor programming and exhibitions in both the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery and the College of East Asian Studies Gallery at Mansfield Freeman Center. All patrons must adhere to and follow the University COVID-19 safety guidelines. Wesleyan requires all visitors to be fully vaccinated. All visitors will need to provide proof of having been fully vaccinated. Public health officials consider an individual to be fully vaccinated two weeks after their final dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Masks are required in all University buildings regardless of vaccination status. Indoor performances as well as special events, including opening receptions in the galleries, will be open to Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff. Vaccinated visitors may attend outdoor events and outdoor activities unmasked. Patrons under the age of 12 are required to wear a mask at outdoor events. Due to current CDC age limits on vaccinations, individuals under the age of 12 will not be permitted at indoor exhibitions.

Image: Tanya Lukin Linklater (left), Raven Chacon (right).