Brian Jungen
Since graduating from the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design in 1992, Brian Jungen has lived and worked in Montreal and New
 York and has recently begun exhibiting his work. Using various materials, Jungen's small scale drawings and large format wall paintings employ his own imagery, or those he solicits from the public, to challenge the influence ethnography has in forming cultural identity. In the last year, he has exhibited in the "Buddy Palace" show at the Or Gallery and also at the Truck Gallery in Calgary, Alberta. Brian Jungen is a member of the Doig River band, of the Dunne-za Nation in Northern BC.

July 28 to September 23, 2001

Brian Jungen is a Vancouver artist who is quickly gaining a strong national reputation as one of Canada's most promising younger artists. He has been invited to exhibit across the country and the National Gallery of Canada recently purchased a major piece for their permanent collection.

Jungen is noted for his use of common everyday objects as source material for remarkably inventive works of art. Examples include disassembling Nike Air Jordan training shoes and reconfiguring them into startling simulations of Northwest Coast Indian masks, and constructing an enormous, suspended whale skeleton from cut-up plastic deck chairs.

For the Contemporary Art Gallery, Jungen will be presenting two new works. An untitled sculptural installation in the Alvin Balkind Gallery consists of an arrangement of pallets, the kind used for moving and storing warehouse materials. Such pallets are usually made of cheap materials, designed for purely utilitarian functions, and considered disposable, often ending up as firewood. Jungen's pallets, however, are constructed from the finest quality cedar, their surfaces sanded to a smooth finish, and then carefully pegged together rather than nailed. These sculptures retain the visual imprint of industrial pallets, yet are simultaneously transformed into highly aesthetic objects that recall the clean economy of Minimalist art from the 1960s. This work, while visually different from his previous projects, is consistent with Jungen's practice of exploring the edge between objects whose purpose is utilitarian and objects whose purpose is for display.

The second work, Unlimited Growth Increases The Divide, is presented on the outside of the gallery and mimics the ubiquitous construction hoardings that populate not only the block that the gallery inhabits, but the transformation of downtown Vancouver in general. Jungen has specifically created the hoarding on Nelson Street just west of the gallery, but he has reversed it. When walking inside the hoarding, the square holes that normally allow one to view the progress of construction direct our view back towards the street and to the block of modest buildings that now appear poised as subjects undoubtedly destined for new development. The title of the work appropriates the text that appears above the entrance of the former Contemporary Art Gallery on Hamilton Street. This text is
a collaborative statement conceived by the owner of the Del Mar
Inn and artist Kathryn Walter that comments upon the survival of
his Edwardian hotel within the redevelopment of the block that envelops it.

Brian Jungen's practice re-crafts prefabricated commodities into sculptural objects, proposing a dialogue between his First Nations ancestry, the global economy and the object of art. Jungen's series of Northwest Coast-style First Nations masks stitched together from disassembled Nike Air Jordans (the Prototype for New Understanding series) puts forward a selection of souvenirs for collecting. In his manner of presentation and within the function of the objects themselves, Jungen engages in an institutional critique of the categories and histories of art institutions, museum practices and ethnographic display. His masks have no labels, save the Nike label, they are detached from any specific "people" and work to displace expected museological frameworks and contexts. In his reconsideration of tradition, Jungen challenges expectation in an anti-nostalgic fashion. Jungen's Shapeshifter, a museological-style whale skeleton constructed from $4.99 white plastic patio chairs, is emblematic of his practice. The title "Shapeshifter" speaks to a changing and morphing set of categories and expectations from both a cultural and artistic standpoint. Jungen's work recognizes the ubiquitous global economy as a basis for communication, even within cultures that have not traditionally been consumer-based. Jungen forges ahead with this mass-cultural material to create non-conformative objects representative of a hybridity that is at once cultural, personal and artistic, defying categorization. In recent works Jungen has in part confronted the loaded representational nature and form of these past works. Specifically it is the sculptural reference to the northwest coast mask and the whale skeleton, metaphors which inspire reference to the artist's personal First Nation lineage, which continue to be confronted in his new body of work. Whilst works like Void and Variant 1 integrate the materiality of these past projects, the shifting of their formal references is ultimately apparent. Utilizing the loaded Nike shoes once again, along with new materials including Coleman coolers, the artist shifts the representational nature of those source references and proposes new meanings through more abstract reconfigurations.