Brian Jungen

The two married in the 1960s, and as a result, the government took away his mother's Indian status and treaty rights, which, according to the government's Indian Act, could only be determined paternally.

Brian Jungen (born April 29, 1970 in Fort St. John, British Columbia) is an artist of Dane-zaa and Swiss ancestry living and working in the North Okanagan of British Columbia.

Working in a diverse range of two and three-dimensional materials Jungen is widely regarded as a leading member of a new generation of Vancouver artists.

While Indigeneity and identity politics have been central to much of his work, Jungen has "a lot of other interests" and themes that run through his oeuvre.

His work addresses many audiences' misconception that "native artists are not allowed to do work that is not about First Nations identity", by making poetic artworks that defy categorization.

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

Born in 1970 Jungen was raised in the remote logging town of Fort St. John and attended public school where he developed an inclination towards visual art.

Sadly, his parents died in a fire and he was subsequently raised by his Aunt.

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.

Following his post-secondary education Jungen spent time studying art history at Concordia University in Montreal, before moving to New York in 1993.

He befriended artist Nicole Eisenmann in New York before returning to Vancouver

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

Jungen's contribution was several wall drawings that explored the stereotyped representations of Indigenous peoples and cultures in BC. The wall drawings tried to understand what "people thought native art [was]" by soliciting drawings from people on the street and turning them into large-scale wall drawings.

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 (1998-2005).

The exhibition caught the attention of the nation's art journalists, critics, academics and curators", and when the Vancouver Art Gallery purchased several of the sculptures, Jungen's importance and legitimacy was sealed. The Prototypes for New Understanding saw Jungen dismantling Nike Air Jordan sneakers, and reassembling them into forms with a striking resemblance to Northwest coast Indigenous masks. The sculptures poignantly drew a comparison between western material fantasies and the fetishism of the 'other' in settler society.

The title of the film references the "1999 Supreme Court of Canada decision confirming First Nations' hunting and fishing rights but clarifying their limitation to the earning of a 'moderate livelihood'".

The film was shown in Banff in partnership with Documenta 13.

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

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".

The park was used by a local dog school offering training "sessions for dogs and [giving] short workshops for visitors on how the equipment in the dog park [could] be used".

In 2000 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 30' long sculpture pointed to anthropological methods of display, natural resources, commodification and globalization, among numerous other themes that activated the work.

The idea of the captive whale was also important to 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 the same way that a natural history museum preserves a whale skeleton, a museum of anthropology preserves Indigenous cultural 'artifacts', both institutions presume an "imminent extinction" of their displayed subjects.

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

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

The life-size replica of a basketball court, made out of sweatshop sewing machine tables, pointed to globalization, exploitive labor and sports fetishism, and opened up new conceptual possibilities in Jungen's work.

In 2005 a retrospective of his work traveled from New York's New Museum to the Vancouver Art Gallery, and Musee d'art Contemporain de Montreal.

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

His 2010/11 exhibition at Catriona Jefferies incorporated "raw animal hides, which were produced during Jungen's visits up north, where he... started hunting again with his relatives".

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".

Trying to describe the sculpture Tomorrow Repeated, (2011) one journalist said: it is "a moose hide, stretched taut across a pair of metallic green car fenders and trussed in the back with strips of skin, like a corset, the whole thing sits on top of a white freezer – convenient storage for the meat the skin once wrapped".

In his own words Jungen said: "people up there, on the reserve, have freezers everywhere, they have car parts everywhere, and they have animal parts everywhere".

In 2012 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.

Also in 2012, Jungen's Prototypes for New Understanding and one of his lawn-chair whale skeletons Cetology represented Vancouver in the Vancouver Pavilion at the Shanghai Biennale.

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

"The new sculptures [were] entirely different – more open and abstract".

The abstract sculptures have a strong modernist sensibility and an understanding of materials that "characterizes so much of Jungen's work".

These new shoe "works are less a direct representation and contain more a suggestion of animal and human faces" they confront our desire to "search for and recognize... patterns" by disappointing audiences who may be searching for Jungen's iconic masks.

In 2022, the Art Gallery of Ontario unveiled its first public art commission by Jungen titled, Couch Monster: Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch’ill. The Dane-zaa within the title translates to "my heart is ripping".