Brian Jungen – Art Gallery of Alberta, JANUARY 29–MAY 8, 2011
Brian Jungen January 29–May 8, 2011
Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
The Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA) will begin a new year of exhibitions with the opening of Brian Jungen, running January 29–May 8, 2011.
This exhibition features three large sculptural installations by internationally celebrated artist Brian Jungen. Throughout the month of January, Jungen has been working on site at the AGA to develop a new, unique configuration for Carapace, one of three works included in the exhibition. The entirety of the AGA’s 6,000 square foot (557 square meters) third floor gallery has been devoted to this major exhibition.
Winner of the inaugural Sobey Art Award in 2002 and the Gershon Iskowitz Prize for Visual Arts in 2010, Jungen has exhibited in galleries and museums world-wide, including the National Gallery of Canada, Tate Modern in London and the New Museum in New York City. Best known for transforming everyday manufactured goods into compelling and often paradoxical works, Jungen gives rich cultural and social meaning to common objects.
“Jungen is one of Canada’s leading artists and a significant contributor to international art and culture,” says Catherine Crowston, Chief Curator / Deputy Director at the Art Gallery of Alberta. “His work reveals the tensions between contemporary material culture and traditional symbolism, often linking his First Nations heritage to political and social issues.”
Carapace was first created in 2009 for an exhibition at the FRAC des Pays de la Loire (France) and completely reconfigured for an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC) later that year. The work is inspired by the geometries of the geodesic dome and the tortoise shell, and unites Jungen’s interest in modernist architecture with his ongoing engagement with animal imagery.
The exhibition also includes two renowned works by Jungen, Shapeshifter (2000) and Cetology (2002). Made from white plastic lawn chairs that have been cut, deconstructed and re-assembled, the works, based on whale skeletons, hang suspended in the gallery space. Oscillating between objects of natural history and critiques of consumer culture, the works reference and call into question the traditions of artifact display typical of natural history museums.
Born in Fort St. John, BC to a Canadian-Swiss father and a Dunne-za mother, Jungen graduated from Vancouver’s Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 1992. He has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally, and his work has been included in many publications and museum collections. Solo exhibitions of his work have been organized by the Tate Modern, London, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam in addition to participation in numerous group exhibitions. Jungen is the first living Native American artist to exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., with the exhibition Strange Comfort.
