Shadow Totem (I Think it Goes Like This)

Nicholas Galanin (b. 1979, Sitka, Alaska; lives in Sitka, Alaska)

Shadow Totem (I Think it Goes Like This) is a cast bronze sculpture embodying history and cultural resilience. A cedar totem carved by the artist will be cut and split like firewood, cast in metal and welded into a (seemingly) precarious stack. Customary cultural totem poles are rooted in stories and crests belonging to Clans, carved to mark, acknowledge, celebrate, or shame in context; eventually they can return to the Land. The title of the work references gaps in knowledge of history and culture, and the work to reassemble and create within splintered contexts. A meditation on persistence despite destruction and loss, the work is an amalgamation of destruction, creation, removal, and persistence; a confluence of mourning, resistance and celebration.