Weekly Shot of Art - Brian Jungen

The swoosh has never looked so good. Brian Jungen's art has arrived, fresh from an acclaimed solo show in New York, and the local media is lapping it up. He seems a little surprised at the frenzy, but I for one, am not. Fresh, edgy, humourous, eye-catching, thought-provoking, socially-conscious without being heavy-handed, clever without being pretentious.. his work has something for everyone.

His iconic haida-styled masks, with their striking red and black and white are easily the most evocative pieces of the show. Walk into the hall of masks squinting and you might think that you were at the Museum of Anthropology. At a glance they are brilliant, but on closer inspection you will notice that the materials are actually dissasembled Nike Air Jordan sneakers. One looks like a "Woman of the Woods", a Banshee-type boogeyman iconic in Aboriginal lore, another clearly resembles an orca, but even the ones that aren't clearly recognizable have a sense of the familiar. Both the sneakers and the masks have achieved an objectified, fetishistic status in society, as desirable icons removed from their original purpose. These mass-produced objects have only had to be altered in a small way to become something else entirely and the process speaks to cultural stereotypes and consumption. "Made in Taiwan" labels on the insides of the shoes/masks take this idea one level further.

Jungen makes the ordinary extraordinary. Sneakers become masks, baseball bats become ceremonial talking sticks, white plastic lawn chairs become enormous, suspended whale skeletons and in his latest piece, 11 black leather couches come together to become a teepee. Entitled simply Furniture Sculpture, this latest piece didn't strike me at first. It wasn't until I walked all the way around it and could smell the leather - a distinctly leather couch-smell rather than buffalo-hide smell, but the smell of animal hide nonetheless - that I understood the magnitude of stripping down huge sofas and reconstucting them into a shelter. The leather couch is our buffalo, and the icon of the American Living Room has melded with the icon of the Wild West and all that. Like the whale bones and masks, the teepee also becomes a common object that has "shapeshifted", and transcended the boundaries of what is normal to become Art.

Below is a less-hyped piece, but one of my favorites. It is a television set playing "The Great Escape" on repeat, hidden inside stacks of cafeteria trays. You can't see the TV, but you can hear the muffled voices coming from inside the trays, as well as see brief bursts of light escaping. It speaks to a jailbreak attempt where the convicts hid inside a similar construction, but on a deeper level, it addresses the disproportional amount of aboriginal convicts in jails, and their comparatively (to white inmates) lengthier jail terms. Named Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time, this work evokes the tedium and hopelessness of so many endless cafeteria lunch lineups and the desparate need for not only escape, but a new system..

Works will be on display until April 30, 2006.
Image 1: Variant I, 2002. Nike athletic footwear, Collection of Michael J. Audain and Yoshiko Karasawa, West Vancouver, Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery. Image 2: Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time, 2001. plastic food trays, television monitor, DVD, wood, Collection of Bob Rennie, Rennie Management Corporation, Vancouver
Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery. Image 3: Cetology, 2002. plastic chairs, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, purchased with the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance Program and the Vancouver Art Gallery Acquisition Fund, 2003. Photo: Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery.