“At first glance Ascension is a stylized ladder with wings, covered in forms referencing commercial products and fashion wrapped with designs appropriated from Indigenous visual language. The work is not a ladder, but a sculpture of one. More accurately, it is a series of understandings and reflections shaped in the form of a ladder. To ascend means to rise to a position of importance and references the Christian belief in Christ’s ascension to heaven after resurrection. In this light, the sculpture is a kind of lens for considering the ways Indigenous culture is made into a tool for climbing, particularly by those who do not belong to it. The work is built from an Indonesian carved curio totem, and as such, has no grounding in the culture it mimics. The visual languages of Pacific Northwest Coast people continue to exist independent from Christian mythology despite the extent to which colonization attempted to destroy them. Ascension is a layering of intergenerational knowledge, observation, and experience on the limits of imitation and the absurdity of culture as a tool for climbing.”

— Nicholas Galanin on Ascension