Brian Jungen: Blankets (2008), Five Year Universe (2013)A member of the Dane-Zaa (pronounced “dan-ne

Brian Jungen: Blankets (2008), Five Year Universe (2013)A member of the Dane-Zaa (pronounced “dan-ney-za”) Nation of Northern British Columbia, Jungen has temporarily relocated from his home in Vancouver to live and work with his family on the Doig River Indian reserve. Although most famous for his series ‘prototypes for understanding’ which melded Nike Shoes into aboriginal masks, Brian Jungen’s practice continues to create work “with sociopolitical commentary, historic symbology, and an ingenious sense of play.”A new series of artworks in Galleries I and II are initially inspired by the First Nation’s traditional, communal practice of constructing garments for ceremonial rituals. Cutting into strips various professional sports jerseys from the NFL and NBA, Jungen weaves a sequence of artworks that are reminiscent of stereotypical, Native American trade blankets.  With the identities of the jerseys and the brands of the teams literally stripped, the blankets merge ceremonial histories, and re-contextualize the fetishization of American sports gear. Hanging on the wall under the guise of a traditional museological or ethnographic display, these works embody a hybrid aesthetic that allegorically represents the present-day globalization of culture.At the core of Jungen’s translation of items of western consumerism and entertainment into the formal vocabulary of cult objects is a critical discourse on and juxtaposition of Native American traditions and western value systems, without,however, making a value judgment. The Canadian artist is not concerned with reanimating a marginalized pictorial language or symbolism but rather with questioning cultural stereotypes and production conditions in the age of global networking.In an equally ironic and enigmatic fashion, Jungen’s sculptures combine the vocabulary of contemporary as well as traditional cults. Starting with the massproduced objects from everyday globalized life, their fragmentation and reassembly, Jungen develops countless transformational variations, making it clear that images draw their power from in equal measure from reality, cliché and projection. Jungen’s complex works are symbioses of the incompatible that overcomethe boundaries between illustrative ethnological objects and commodityfetishism, mythological symbol and cheap mass products.For Five Year Universe (2011), Jungen used five stretched elk hides to create 20 silver-ink relief mono prints on large rectangles of thin black foam. These prints are arranged vertically, aligned side-by-side and top-to-bottom to form two horizontal rows of 10, making it the largest work in the exhibition. Past configurations of this work have left the images of the hides relatively intact; in this new configuration of the work at the Kunstverein, the prints suggest antlers more so than hides, and they occasionally meet to suggest new forms (like birds’ wings, say), though mostly they do not. Instead, this is an abstract composition, concerned not with the noun form of process, but its verb. - See more at: http://www.canadianart.ca/reviews/2013/05/15/brian-jungen-hannover-kunstverein/#sthash.PSe09DpZ.dpuf -- source link

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