Alexandra Lockett

Brian Jungen

2 Dec 2006 - 11 Feb 2007

Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art

Opening Hours:

Tues - Sun, 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.

Admission:

3.50 euro

1.75 euro

Free (CKV, MJK, Rotterdampas)

Brian Jungen ( born in Fort St. John, British Columbia, 1970) lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.   Recent   solo exhibitions include Brian Jungen , at the Musée d'art contemporain, Montreal and at Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia (2006); at New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, (2005) .   Recent group shows include the Holy Land: Diaspora in the Desert at the Heard Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona (2006); and Human Game: Winners and Losers at Stazione Leopolda, Florence, Italy (2006). Jungen will feature in the 2008 Sydney Biennale.

Witte de With is delighted to present Brian Jungen's first major solo show in Europe, featuring several new works and accompanied by a new publication. Along with a young generation of Vancouver-based artists, Jungen has established himself as an important figure on the international art scene. Born to a Swiss-Canadian father and a First Nations mother and brought up in the Dane-zaa nation, Jungen's mixed media work draws upon this cultural intersection.

He recognizes the global economy and capitalism as a basis for communication.   With material taken from mass culture, Jungen makes rebel objects representative of a hybridity that is at once cultural, personal, and creative; objects which defy strict classification.  

Jungen's Prototypes for New Understanding (1998-2005)are a contemporary example of bricolage: a set of what seem to be ceremonial masks which, rather than being carved from wood, have been produced by cutting and remolding red, white, and black Nike Air Jordan trainers. The Prototypes slip between being a fake consumer product and an authentic native artifact, disrupting expected museological frameworks and ethnographic displays. Where are these objects from? To whom do they belong? How should they be categorized? Where should they be displayed?

Jungen's Cetology (2002), a faux whale skeleton constructed from plastic patio chairs, is archetypal of his practice. The metaphor of the endangered bowhead whale crafted from mass-produced, ubiquitous items triggers a panoply of associations: from consumer culture to the traditions of display found in museums, zoos, and aquariums. It is suspended between the categories of sculpture, a natural history specimen, or perhaps even an animal rights protest against whale hunting.

Cetology evokes the work of Minimalists such as Dan Flavin and Carl André, as do Structural Integrity Test (1999/2006) and Mise en scène (2000) with their stacked repetitive units (in this case, cheap plastic furnture). Jungen plays on the readymade and the power of the institution to bestow meaning upon everyday materials. However, his seemingly minimalist works include powerful references to the modern global economy, thereby subverting the Minimalist aesthetic tradition.

The form of Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time can be understood in terms of the classic minimalist cube, since it consists of a handcrafted cedar pallet on top of which sit neatly stacked cafeteria trays in several colors.   This work volumetrically implies the body; the number of trays and their colours stand for the number of Aboriginal males incarcerated in Canadian penal institutions.   Each tray represents one individual and the colours correspond to the length of their sentence.   In the center the work is hollow, with a TV inserted, its presence only given away by the murmur of noise and the light emitted.   On the TV the classic prison film The Great Escape is playing.   This tray structure was originally built by a prisoner from Milhaven Maximum security prison who knew that trays and dishes were sent to be cleaned at Bath prison, a minimum security prison, from which the prisoner thought it would be easier to escape.

For Field Work (1999), Jungen asked members of the public to respond with a drawing to the question "What is Indian art?" Some people drew elaborate headdresses, or dream catchers. Others drew beer bottles. Jungen then enlarged the images and scratched them into the gallery walls, thus converting these instantaneous drawings into monumental murals.

Jungen's practice asks the viewer to consider issues as complex and as wide ranging as identity politics, globalization, ecology, natural history, anthropology, mythology, and commodity fetishism. He mixes references, reconfigures material, and stirs up influences from different cultural sources, as a strategy to question the demarcation of boundaries used to categorize norms.