One Fine Show: Nicholas Galanin’s ‘Exist in the Width of a Knife’s Edge’ in Baltimore
By Dan Duray
September 20, 2024
Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum outside of New York City—a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
Even if you don’t have kids, the back-to-school season is grueling in New York City. This year was particularly rough, with the art world asked to snap to attention right after Labor Day—I received emails that Tuesday asking for me to attend openings that evening! See, international scheduling in the fair duopoly had led the 2024 Armory Show to be scheduled that very week and if some more time to get our pre-fall bearings would have been appreciated it, was as ever a pleasure to absorb the fair’s Platform section, this year curated by Eugenie Tsai.
One of the best works in that section was I think it goes like this (memory and interference) (2024), a beautiful and imposing ten-foot-tall totem pole, deconstructed with the faces turned around and butting into each other’s personal spaces, cast in bronze by the Indigenous artist Nicholas Galanin. Just a few days prior, Galanin had opened “Exist in the Width of a Knife’s Edge,” a new exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art that collects new and recent works that take a similarly postmodern attitude to native identity.
The centerpiece of this exhibition is an installation that shares its name. It consists of sixty porcelain daggers that embody the Indigenous design and technology of the Lingít but are decorated with Russian ceramic patterns. Bone white and beautiful, their designs are almost as intricate as Fabergé’s.
These are not laid on satin, as they might be in a museum section dedicated to ancient weaponry, but suspended from the ceiling in an elaborate pattern using invisible wires. Their shadows look like they’re dancing. In the wall text, Galanin says of these metaphorically weighty works: “If these daggers break, their destruction would produce sharp projectiles and edges, rendering new forms to use as tools or weapons.”
There’s also a giant polar bear. We Dreamt Deaf (2015) sees ursine taxidermy melting into a rug and a streaming ribbon, seeming to yowl in silent admonition of the unfortunate relationship between nature and decor. A newer taxidermy piece Infinite Weight (2022) places a wolf on the ceiling and in a time-lapse video that shows the landscape moving beyond it. It’s a good demonstration of Galanin’s maturity over the seven years between which these works were made. The earlier work is as angry as the bear. This new one is expansive, inviting us to identify with the wolf as victims of this modern world ourselves.
Galanin is one to watch. He participated in the 2017 Venice Biennale but withdrew a sound piece from the infamous 2019 Whitney Biennial over the museum’s ties to Warren Kanders. His new show in Baltimore is a good encapsulation of the art world’s politics over the past decade—and perhaps also where they’re headed.
“Nicholas Galanin: Exist in the Width of a Knife’s Edge” is on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art through November of 2025.