Couple of years ago I saw the amazing work of an artist online but his name was not mentioned at all. Yesterday I found some old magazine in a trash and “bang!!!” 2 spreads about him: Brian Jungen. He is a Canadian artist with Swiss and Dunne-za First Nations roots. Here is what wikipedia has to say about him:
Jungen’s art draws upon the tradition of “found art,” espoused by such twentieth-century artists as Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp. Instead of presenting objects “as-is,” however, Jungen often reworks them without fully concealing their original meaning or purpose. For instance, Jungen’s series Prototypes of New Understanding consists of aboriginal masks assembled from parts of Nike Air Jordan shoes and hand-sewn. Jungen writes: “It was interesting to see how by simply manipulating the Air Jordan shoes you could evoke specific cultural traditions whilst simultaneously amplifying the process of cultural corruption and assimilation. The Nike mask sculptures seemed to articulate a paradoxical relationship between a consumerist artefact and an ‘authentic’ native artifact.” The Nike footwear that Jungen had employed incorporates in their unmodified forms similar colours to traditional First Nations artwork and wood carvings: red and black. However, other projects, such as a series of wooden pallets, painstakingly crafted out of red cedar, a First Nations tent made out of “11 leather couches” and Jungen’s large “whale-bone” sculptures made out of plastic chairs (some still with Canadian Tire price stickers on them) seek to defamiliarize even members of Western society that are unfamiliar with First Nation themes by placing familiar objects in unfamiliar positions or situations and vice versa.
Posted on November 18, 2007 at 09:36 AM | Previous Entry | Next Entry | Entry List | Email Entry | Digg
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i can’t even lie, i love it.