In his Buffalodance series (2025), Duane Linklater presents abstract compositions built through layered gestures. Working across multiple materials on linen, he constructs rhythmic fields of marks that remain resolutely abstract. Passages of blues, oranges, grays, blacks, whites, and magentas move across the compositions, activating their surfaces and emphasizing the rhythmic accumulation of forms.

This series draws inspiration from the performance buffalounit for bison bison (dance_hum for dirtbath) by Eagles With Eyes Closed and Tanya Lukin Linklater, presented as part of Duane Linklater: 12 + 2 at Dia Art Foundation in 2025. Combining music, dance, and text, the performance drew on buffalo movement to explore relationships between Indigenous knowledge, ecology, and embodied experience. In the paintings, these ideas are translated into layered, gestural marks that evoke movement, migration, and the interconnectedness of bodies and land. In several works, the frame remains open rather than forming a closed square, suggesting a landscape that resists fixed boundaries.

Created for an exhibition at The Campus, an exhibition space housed in the former Ockawamick School in Claverack, New York, the series also engages the layered histories of its site. Located on Indigenous homelands, the former school evokes the broader histories of Indian Residential Schools and colonial assimilation policies. For Linklater, whose family has been directly affected by these histories, Buffalodance reflects on remembrance, resilience, and the enduring legacies of colonialism, positioning abstraction as both a formal language and a carrier of cultural memory.