Canadian Art Spotlight: Brian Jungen

 Brian Jungen, Prototypes for New Understanding (1998-2005), partial installation view. 

Photo Trevor Mills/Vancouver Art Gallery.

Cetology (2002). Plastic Chairs. Photo: Trevor Mills/Courtesy Vancouver Art Gallery. 

Brian Jungen was born in Fort St. John, BC on April 29, 1970.  Jungen's work melds the ancient with innovation. Using contemporary, ordinary and often commercial objects, he re-figures traditional indigenous symbology. As Kimberley Philips, author of Fetishism, Curiosity, and the Work of Brian Jungen, writes: "the transformation of these objects is a strategy of exploration and critique, an interrogation of the messy and often uncomfortable intersection of the global economy, the discourses of art, and his own, part aboriginal ancestry and its cultural stereotypes."

Brian Jungen is also the recepient of the 2010 Gershon Iskowitz Prize.

Images source