NICHOLAS GALANIN X MERRITT JOHNSON

Nicholas Galanin and Merritt Johnson are visual artists living and working in Sitka, Alaska.
Galanin’s work offers a perspective rooted in his connection to the land and intentionally broad engagement with contemporary culture. For more than a decade, he has been embedding incisive observation into his work, investigating and expanding intersections of culture and concept in form, image, and sound. His works are vessels of knowledge, culture, and technology — inherently political, generous, unflinching, and poetic.

Johnson’s work is a navigation of periphery, intersectionality, separation, and connection. Her multidisciplinary works are containers for thought and feeling. For two decades Johnson’s work has insisted on facing and destroying the oppression of bodies, land, sex, and culture, synthesizing necessity, a refusal of binaries, fractions of division, and control. She embraces peripheral overlap and the impossibility of disentanglement.

ABOUT THE WORK:

Open Container references containers of knowledge in many forms. It is composed of three life sized figures, their bodies covered almost completely in dark floral fabric embellished with beadwork, tassels, deer toes, feathers, and ribbon work. One of the figures leans over a large book, their head casting a shadow of negative space that has been cut out from the pages below it. Beside this figure, a smaller, child-like figure leans close, holding a rawhide-covered tin can telephone towards the ear of the adult, the phone serving as a transmitter of knowledge between them. At a distance, a second child-size figure holds another tin can telephone, cradling a Tlingit mask woven from the pages of the cut-out book. The scene presents us with various containers for knowledge, culture, connection, and continuum. The title encourages us to act as open containers—the only way we might successfully share and receive knowledge and connection. At the same time, in a reference anti-alcohol “open container” laws, it warns against the dangers of those vessels which we open without realizing their potential to harm, distract, and derail. The work is an amalgamation of what it means to see and be seen, to listen and be heard. It is about continuum and about what can be lost, remembered, and felt.