Né 1970 à Fort St. John, BC. Vit et travaille à Vancouver.
Brian Jungen is like a Walt Whitman who referred to his poetic gamble with "I am multitudes." He selectively appropriates and twists myriad sources: personal experiences of a First Nations/ European upbringing, commercialized youth street and traditional First Nations culture versus the culture eviscerating action of modernity. Perhaps most important however is Jungen's ability to recognize a mirror of his own synthesizing vision of the world that makes possible a unity of opposites. With one ironic eye and one relegated to visual wit, Jungen undermines the attendant values in any form of representation. What best reflects Jungen's ability to build and break down metaphors and models of representation is his reorganizing of things and ideas in physical space, "the dithyrambic gift of synthesis, the almost monstrous faculty to perceive as similar what all other men have conceived as different"? (Claude Lévi-Strauss*) Can new meaning always be assigned to a coded sign system endlessly shifted, branded, devalued and rebuilt? Jungen complicates matters by actively undermining and reworking threads of association.
Crack the Sky presents a new sculpture on golf and Indian reservations.
* See Witness to a Surrealist Vision (an ongoing exhibition), The Menil Collection, Houston, 2006, presenting objects owned and promoted as art objects by French Surrealists.