Nicholas Galanin "interrupts sightline" of Gateway Arch with animal-hide sculpture
Alaska-based artist Nicholas Galanin has created a metal sculpture resembling a stretched animal hide in front of the St Louis Gateway Arch to challenge "narratives of westward expansion" for art festival Counterpublic.
Land is Never a Gateway (Sightline/Lifeline) is located in front of the Eero Saarinen-designed monument, on a small sidewalk plot. From there, visitors can crouch down and look up at the piece, which is meant to create an optical illusion with the gateway.
When viewed from below, the sculpture resembles animal hide stretched across the arch, transforming it visually from a monument into a hide-processing frame.
Galanin created the piece to challenge the narratives surrounding the ideologies of Westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, movements under which colonial settlers, ranchers and the US government began to migrate past the Mississippi River and into the western United States beginning in the early 1800s.
Eero Saarinen's Gateway Arch, a grand, 630-foot-tall ( 94-metre-tall) swooping structure located on the banks of the Mississippi River, was designed as a monument to Westward expansion and is referred to as "The Gateway to the West" in popular culture.
"The work developed through thinking about the Gateway Arch and the narratives of westward expansion it monumentalizes," Galanin told Dezeen. "I wanted to interrupt that sightline."
"That alignment is both a sightline and a lifeline: a reminder that perspective determines which histories are visible and which have been obscured."
Galanin, who is based in Sitka, Alaska and is of local Lingit and Unangax̂ descent, was informed by visits to St Louis for the piece, where he researched local history as part of the commission for Counterpublic.
Specifically, he examined "the histories held in the land itself" and "Indigenous dispossession, racial capitalism, segregation, and extraction," he told Dezeen.
Processing a hide, or animal skin, is a traditional art practised by many Native American and First Nations people. One step in the lengthy process involves tying the hide to a frame to stretch and cure it, which is pictured in Galanin's sculpture.
Galanin often explores "adaptation, resilience, survival, active cultural amnesia, dream, memory, cultural resurgence, connection to and disconnection from the land" through his work, according to his artist statement.
The third edition of the Counterpublic brings together local and global artists to create commissioned pieces and works around the city.
This year's festival, Coyote Time, invited artists to explore the history, present and future of St Louis, and included installations by artists such as Oglála Lakȟóta artist Kite and Los Angeles-based artist Alice Bucknell among fifty others.
It is led by executive director James McAnally and assistant curator Charlie Farrell, with guest curation by Jordan Carterm, Rapheal Fonesca, Stefanie Hessler, Nora N Khan and Wanda Nandibush.
In 2023, New York artist Torkwase Dyson designed a monolithic black structure that highlighted the ragtime music of American composer Scott Joplin for the event.
The photography is by Jon Gitchoff, courtesy of Counterpublic
Counterpublic runs from 10 September to 12 December. For more architecture, design and art events across the world, visit Dezeen Events Guide.
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