There once was a trader, a white man at the store back on the Rez, who was so good at tricking Indians they were a little bit proud of him. One day an Indian came up to the counter and said to the trader, “Now you are the cheatin’ wonder of the whole civilized world, but that one over there, he’s even better than you are.” “Why him? He’s only a scrawny critter!” “Yep, that’s the one. So why don’t you let him prove it?” So the white man ambled over to Coyote and said, “Let’s you and me have us a tricking ...

This group exhibition brings together artworks and objects to trace various transformations of meaning, reception, and use over time. The titular metaphor of the whale’s belly—a mythic space separated from lived reality—plays on the residual legacy of the white cube as an allegedly bracketed space of reflection, contemplation and perceptual or political transformation. Just as Jonah, who in the biblical account was swallowed by a whale, and perhaps the visitor, are transformed through isolated meditation, In the Belly of the Whale plays content against its framing to question both how an artifact references a given historical moment and how different modes ...