Brian Jungen

Brian Jungen is a Canadian artist from British Columbia with Swiss and Dunne-za First Nations ancestry; he is based in Vancouver. Jungen was born in Fort St. John, British Columbia on April 29, 1970. He graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 1992.

Artistic Approach

Jungen's art draws upon the tradition of "found art," espoused by such twentieth-century artists as Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp. Instead of presenting objects "as-is," however, Jungen often reworks them without fully concealing their original meaning or purpose. For instance, Jungen's series "Prototypes of New Understanding" consists of aboriginal masks assembled from parts of Nike Air Jordan shoes and hand-sewn. Jungen writes: "It was interesting to see how by simply manipulating the Air Jordan shoes you could evoke specific cultural traditions whilst simultaneously amplifying the process of cultural corruption and assimilation. The Nike mask sculptures seemed to articulate a paradoxical relationship between a consumerist artefact and an 'authentic' native artifact."

The Nike footwear that Jungen had employed incorporates in their unmodified forms similar colours to traditional First Nations artwork and wood carvings: red and black. However, other projects, such as a series of wooden pallets, painstakingly crafted out of red cedar, a First Nations tent made out of "11 leather couches" and Jungen's large "whale-bone" sculptures made out of plastic chairs (some still with Canadian Tire price stickers on them) seek to defamiliarize even members of Western society that are unfamiliar with First Nation themes by placing familiar objects in unfamiliar positions or situations and vice versa.

Yet other projects, such as Jungen's "Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time," are more political. In this specific example, the plastic food trays are colour-coded to match the statistics of jail sentences given to First Nations individuals, while (inspired by a prison-break exhibit Jungen once saw), the inner part of the sculpture conceals a television and a DVD player, quietly playing the film "The Great Escape" from the inside.

An [http://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/exhibitions_brianjungen.cfm exhibition] of Jungen's work was held at the Vancouver Art Gallery (Canada) from January 28 to April 30, 2006.

References and Sources

Online Exhibits and Media

* [http://thetyee.ca/gallery/2006/01/25/BrianJungen/index.html The Tyee]
* [http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/search/artist_e.jsp?iartistid=25208 Cybermuse] National Gallery of Canada.
* [http://www.artfacts.net/index.php/pageType/artistInfo/artist/24208 Artifacts.net]