Nicholas Galanin: Baltimore Museum of Art
By Brian Karl
January 1, 2025
Nicholas Galanin’s “Exist in the Width of a Knife’s Edge”—part of the Baltimore Museum of Art’s “Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum” series—is an exhibition that pushes back against power imbalances played out, in part, via Euro-American trajectories of representation and appropriation. Through objects of questionable provenance and the projections of strange afterlives embodied by animal remains, Galanin confronts viewers with legacies of intensely intertwined cross-cultural currents in the wake of settler colonialism.
In what has become a signature move for Galanin, who is of Tlingit and Unangax̂ ancestry, the vestiges of once-living creatures are transformed and made to appear as though they’ve been partially—some might even say monstrously—reanimated. The rug-like back end of a polar bear in We Dreamt Deaf, 2015, morphs up into its full-figured and confrontational upper half, with claws extended. But the sculpture can also be read in the opposite direction, the flattened hindquarters evoking the emaciated figures of their kin starved by climate change. The animal’s mouth is pried open but only slightly, as if weakly screaming in protest.
Such anthropogenic misery is further encoded in Unconverted / Converted, 2022, a diptych pairing the hide of a baby deer with a pixelated representation of it rendered in acrylic on wood. Elisions within the digital version include the fawn’s camouflaging spots. Its fur, juxtaposed with the lossy painted artifact, calls out the deleterious effects of late-capitalist systems on both the natural world and Indigenous existence, as the image’s reductive information eschews meaning, possibility, and functionality.
Galanin’s most nuanced reanimation occurs with Infinite Weight, 2022, in which a taxidermied wolf hangs upside down, paws firmly planted on the ceiling. A short, looped video plays on a wall-mounted screen nearby, featuring the stuffed animal standing frozen in an outdoor setting, highlighting the species’ endangerment due to non-Native hunting. An accompanying wall text by Galanin describes this vulnerable creature as both a target and a victim of colonizing settler actions and ideology. Yet the wolf’s preternatural stillness in the video (which also depicts sped-up clouds scudding overhead and a lake with swiftly rippling waters), along with its gravity-defying placement as an object in the museum, hint at its supernatural powers. This sense of uncanniness is augmented by the ominous, larger-than-life shadow of the upended canine, which looms on a section of wall above the video screen.
In the large-scale photograph Artist carrying the weight of imitation (after Christ carrying the cross), 2024, Galanin presents himself as a martyr to white cultural expectations and appropriations, dragging a weighty but fake wooden totem pole on his back. In this darkly tongue-in-cheek picture, Galanin decries the unwelcome and repressive impacts on Native lives unleashed over many generations by Christianity.
A similar view of Western religion and hierarchical power underlies the imagery at play in Ascension, 2022, a reproduction of a Lingít wood totem design incorporated into a stepladder made by Indonesian carvers. Galanin uses this work to critique the too-easy sprawl of globalizing cultural circulation that has created centuries of misappropriations by non-Indigenous others.
In Exist in the width of a knife’s edge, 2024, dozens of ceramic daggers—ersatz knockoffs of Indigenous weapons used for combat—are seemingly suspended midair and adorned by mesh-like patterns originating in Russia, one of the earliest colonial powers to have a presence in this part of North America, one that altered the cultural lifeways of Indigenous dwellers. These tools, made into impotent ornamental tchotchkes, further highlight the neutralizing effects of the colonialist imagination on Native history and culture. The blades, which would shatter with any attempt to wield them, point to the exploitative nature of white consumerism, a force that turned these tools of war into ambiguous souvenirs.
Galanin brings powerful presences and absences, deftly framed and installed, into this institution. Experiencing the show feels like viewing a series of crime scenes in a shop of horrors, albeit one that is brightly lit. Insistent currents of protest run throughout Galanin’s work, ceaselessly critiquing the history of colonization and the devastation it has wrought. But the show also underscores the stifling effects of the museum itself, a venue where the white perspective is frequently the primary lens through which all else is understood or seen. In this rare case of allowing a different view to be represented in a museum presentation, Galanin subverts that status quo to great effect.