34 Facts About Brian Jungen

Brian Jungen's father was a Swiss immigrant to Canada and met his mother, from the Dane-zaa nation, in the interior of British Columbia.

Brian Jungen moved to Vancouver for his post-secondary education, and graduated from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design with a Diploma of Visual Art in 1992.

Brian Jungen befriended artist Nicole Eisenmann in New York before returning to Vancouver.

In 1997 Brian Jungen participated in the group show Buddy Place at the OR Gallery in Vancouver.

Brian Jungen's contribution was several wall drawings that explored the stereotyped representations of Indigenous peoples and cultures in BC.

In 1999 Jungen had a solo show at the Charles H Scott Gallery where he showed more wall drawings and his Prototypes for New Understanding.

The Prototypes for New Understanding saw Brian Jungen dismantling Nike Air Jordan sneakers, and reassembling them into forms with a striking resemblance to Northwest coast Indigenous masks.

In 2000 Brian Jungen had a solo show at the OR Gallery where he mounted Shapeshifter, the first of an eventual three whale skeletons built out of white plastic lawn chairs and suspended in the gallery as if at a natural history museum.

The idea of the captive whale was important to Brian Jungen's thinking as he saw "a parallel to the situation of the First Nations individual who is both marginalized and fetishized by mainstream culture".

In 2002 [Brian Jungen] was awarded the inaugural $50,000 Sobey Art award.

In 2004 Brian Jungen installed Court at the exhibition space Triple Candie in New York.

Brian Jungen had an incredibly rapid rise to international fame, which brought with it a rigorous travel schedule; in response Brian Jungen has taken to spending extended periods of time each year "up north, on the Doig River first Nation".

Brian Jungen has worked with the animal hides in numerous ways including making prints from them and stretching them over car parts and modern furniture "to make some of [his] own drums".

In 2012 Brian Jungen collaborated with artist Duane Linklater on the film Modest Livelihood, the hour-long film silently documents the two artists on a hunting trip in Northern British Columbia.

Brian Jungen exhibited in Kassel, Germany as part of Documenta 13's central programming.

Brian Jungen's contribution to Documenta was a dog park, made up of "sculptures that [functioned] both as tunnels and platforms for pets, as well as benches for their owners".

In 2016 Brian Jungen had shows at both Catriona Jefferies and Casey Kaplan, which saw the artist returning to one of his original materials: Nike sneakers.

Brian Jungen inspired by the famous large elephant, Jumbo, wanted to convey how there is cruelly in entertainment and art.

Brian Jungen's work makes "connections between his First Nations ancestry, Western art history and the global economy".

The confiscated 'culture' has subsequently been displayed in museums of anthropology; as Brian Jungen says: "a lot of my exposure to my ancestry is through museums".

Brian Jungen realized the significance of 'display' to the colonial ideology and the way that museums of anthropology have historicized and "mythologized" Indigenous culture as a way of maintaining colonial domination.

Fully aware of the colonial motives of anthropological display, it was coincidence that Brian Jungen "went into Nike Town [where] they had sneakers of theirs in glass vitrines".

Brian Jungen again invoked museology in his sculpture Shapeshifter where he transformed plastic lawn chairs into the form of a whale skeleton and hung it as if it were a "display found in natural history museums or public aquarium".

In 2001 Brian Jungen produced Untitled, which was a stack of wooden pallets "displayed in a seemingly random pile, the way pallets might be found at the edge of a loading bay".

In 2004 Brian Jungen produced Court a monumental sculpture made of "231 wood veneer sweatshop [sewing] tables, sourced from a secondhand broker in New Jersey", and arranged into a scale replica of a basketball court.

Brian Jungen has continued to explore the fetishistic nature of commodities and their relationships to Indigeneity.

Brian Jungen's interest in animals in captivity is a parallel between the voyeuristic way in which audiences look at captive animals and the way audiences look at Indigenous material culture.

The Nike footwear that Brian Jungen had employed incorporates in their unmodified forms similar colours to traditional First Nations artwork and wood carvings: red and black.

An exhibition of Brian Jungen's work was held at the Vancouver Art Gallery from January 28 to April 30,2006.

Brian Jungen is the first living Native American artist to exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, with his survey exhibition entitled "Strange Comfort" that was on view from October 16,2009, to August 8,2010.

In 2011, Brian Jungen unveiled three public sculptures at the Banff Centre entitled The ghosts on top of my head, consisting of white powder-coated steel benches, each in the shape of an antler from an elk, moose, and caribou.

Brian Jungen's sculpture entitled Carapace was inspired by Jules Verne's mythical giant animals and was exhibited in Loire Valley, where Jules Verne is from.

Brian Jungen grew up in an isolated community in the Peace River area in credits this with stimulating his creativity.

Brian Jungen's work is in the National Gallery of Canada's permanent collection of contemporary artists.