Totemists

Tina Braegger, Olivia Erlanger, Amy Granat, Nick Herman, Luchita Hurtado, Andrea Longacre-White, Carlos Reyes

Organized by Marie Heilich

As vehicles of orientation, totemic objects act as channels or mediums connecting the symbol to the symbolized. A universal phenomenon among early societies, totems have become an archetype for determining kinship and identity. As such, totems function as an essential axis necessary for social orientation and survival. As symbols of partial-inclusion / partial-exclusion, totems are caught up in series after series of semiotic accommodation and collapse.

Historically, totems have held a sacred connection between the unified signifier, seemingly pregnant with meaning, and the primordial kernel of the signified. However, when peeling back the layers of familiar symbols, mascots, or trademarks that traffic in significance, we find that they don’t hold some pre-existing fullness, already containing all of the meanings attributed to them. Rather, the totem is an empty place from which to see the other and identify the self, only retrospectively recognized through difference.

Drawing on the writing of Donna Haraway, Totemists explores her notion of “kin” to describe the complex intersections of human and nonhuman systems and the continued necessity to map these relationships. To restate Haraway’s sentiment, “to be a one at all, you must be a many.” This multi-species act of “becoming with” is necessarily interdependent in that our relations have no foundation to rest. In this way, totems continue to elicit strategies of ecological conservation, working against human-centric forced production and extraction of value from the natural world.

In a selection of works by seven contemporary artists, Totemists explores the performative, tautological, and inherently self-referential operation of contemporary totems that, despite our secular age refuse to disappear, implicating us all. By recognizing totem’s patriarchal and hierarchical legacy, the exhibition affirms the historic failure and continued relevance of totems as facilitators of coexistence and biodiversity.