The Coyote Behind the Mask
K Art is happy to work with Meskwaki multimedia artist Duane Slick again for his solo exhibition, The Cadence of Night, on view until February 23rd. We previously worked with Slick back in 2020 for the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, More Than a Trace. Now, a collection of recent work fills the walls of our first floor. And while the large-scale night paintings leave an impression, the coyote’s howl continues to ring in my ears.
The coyote has become a notable motif in Slick’s work. Whether painting or print, its gnarled teeth and warped visage come alive beyond the surface, its demeanor varies in each portrait, often timid, angry, and alone, but its paralyzing glare never ceases. For The Cadence of Night, the Rhode Island-based artist presents a series of 14 x 11-inch paintings inspired by coyote masks in his collection. Works such as Your Doppelgänger and Candid Coyote present a distorted compilation of the animal from multiple angles and shadows. About this overlapping, Slick writes, with the inspiration of the late Jimmie Durham, “it seemed to me the Coyote is not always knowable, and this un-knowability is a survival strategy.”
The four-legged beast is best known for being a trickster. Its mythology is popular amongst North American Indigenous cultures, spreading from the western Canadian American coast to the American Plains to Central America. Some credit the coyote as the creator of humans, the bringer of fire, and even the maker of Earth. While every community’s description varies, its troublemaking and curious natures are consistent. As the growing European population settled along the American Northeast, the coyote faced a significant setback, and numbers dwindled.
The 1990s were a critical year of social awareness and change. In conversation with Slick, he recalls “the multiple fronts in the culture wars; the movement to recognize multiculturalism in the mainstream and academia, alongside the push for historical revision, when master narratives were being called out for what they were.” As scholars scrambled to expand their programs, Columbus’s 500th anniversary of his American arrival was fast approaching. Acclaimed artist and curator Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was preparing her groundbreaking 1992 exhibition, Submuloc show/Columbus wohs, when she contacted Slick to participate in the project, requesting a strong political body of work.
Before this, Duane was an abstract-landscape oil painter, veering from the overtly political. However, as social issues continued to rise, and with an upcoming residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, he searched for his political message along the eastern cape. Coincidentally, the coyote returned to Cape Cod after being decimated by white settlers during colonization. Thus, Slick familiarized himself with the coyote through Indigenous poetry, oral histories with the family, and traditional trickster stories. “It was then I decided that I could not be overtly political and let the coyote do the work for me,” he writes.
The coyote runs rabid in The Cadence of Night, shaking its head in the shadows while never taking its eye off its prey. Slick reminds us of its trickster nature in his energized silkscreen prints. In the Fall of 2022, he returned to his hometown and visited Midwest Pressed at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, IA. Slick created prints like Grey Salish Coyote and Red Apparition from tracings of a 3D scan of the coyote mask seen in his smaller paintings. All works are monumental in scale and based on photographic information. The ink is bold, pristine, and shimmering – likely from the subtle glitter.
We are left curious about the ever-evolving beast; perhaps his resurgence is a sociopolitical symbol of Indigenous tradition, or perhaps his fearful façade is another trick. Still, the coyote’s laughter ripples through the snowy skies here in Buffalo, NY waiting to be heard by all. As Duane Slick says, “[the laughter] echoed through the lecture halls of histories, and it was so powerful and so distracting that I forgot my place in linear time, and now I work from an untraceable present.”
The Cadence of Night is on view until February 23rd, 2023. For tours or group visits, please contact me at frosario@thek.art. For general inquiries and availability, please contact contact@thek.art.