Three Can't-Miss Contemporary-Art Shows in Vancouver
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Three can’t-miss contemporary-art shows in Vancouver MARSHA LEDERMAN VANCOUVER — The Globe and Mail Friday, Jan. 22, 2016 Brian Jungen at Catriona Jeffries Gallery It’s been more than 10 years since Jungen ended B.C. artist Brian Jungen has five new Air Jordan sculptures at Catriona the series that made him a darling of the art world Jeffries Gallery. and beyond. Prototypes for New Understanding (1998-2005) saw the B.C. artist disassemble Nike Air Jordan running shoes and reconfigure them to resemble Northwest Coast aboriginal masks. Red, white and black, the sneakers were even the right colours for Jungen’s smart, whimsical investigation of identity and appropriation, influenced by his own First Nations heritage. The series was always meant to end at 23 – Michael Jordan’s number – although Jungen did produce two additional masks: one for philanthropist Michael Audain and the other for Jordan himself, at the athlete’s request. “I couldn’t say no, right?” Jungen says. Now, in a major development, Jungen is returning to the source material and making new work with it. Five of his new Air Jordan sculptures are installed at Catriona Jeffries Gallery for an exhibi- tion that opened Thursday. (A sixth – actually the first work in the new series – is installed at the Rennie show; an all-black mask-like sculpture reminiscent of the KKK or Abu Ghraib that serves as a sort of marker separating Prototypes and the new works.) The new sculptures are entirely different – more open and abstracted. Gone are direct references to the First Nations masks – although suggestions can still be found. Unlike the first series, these new sculptures include laces and soles. In one piece, 13 are stitched together, creating the illusion from certain angles of one giant sole. The new works have been influenced by Jungen’s new circumstances. He has left Vancouver and bought a ranch outside Vernon, B.C., where he has a large studio and powerful machinery – a saddle sewing machine, a band saw – allowing him to work with the shoes in a new way, using the same kind of tools that were used to manufacture them. Brian Jungen is at Catriona Jeffries Gallery until Feb. 27 (catrionajeffries.com). Winter 2015/2016: Collected Works at the Rennie Collection Since Vancouver real estate marketer Rennie opened his own gallery in 2009 to show works from his astonishing contemporary-art collection, most of the exhibitions have featured a single artist. The show opening this weekend breaks new ground – the museum’s first survey and the first Rennie himself has curated. Nearly 60 works by more than 40 artists offer commentary on these chaotic times – racism, gun violence, wealth inequality. The exhibition also invokes a feeling of chaos as you move through, greeted first by John Baldes- sari’s large-scale installation Camel (Albino) Contemplating Needle (Large). The 2013 work refer- ences a biblical passage about it being easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven – conjuring one-per-centers (and a chuckle, when you consider Rennie’s own wealth). Upstairs, the enormous Animal Farm ’92 (after George Orwell) by Tim Rollins and K.O.S. fea- tures pages of George Orwell’s classic marked up with drawings of animals affixed with heads of political leaders of the day – Brian Mulroney fronts a dog (with devilish ears); Nelson Mandela a raven. Installed nearby is Brian Jungen’s Nike Air Jordan raven mask and Ai Weiwei’s Coloured Vases – seven Han Dynasty vases dipped in industrial paint, offering a commentary on China’s complexities. Hank Willis Thomas’s 2004 work Priceless, which Rennie hung in his office after the fallout from the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., feels painfully contemporary: “3-piece suit: $250. New socks $2. 9mm Pistol: $80 … Picking the perfect casket for your son: priceless.” Thomas J. Price’s 34-inch bronze is a black man with a cellphone in one hand while the contents of his other hand are a mystery inside his hoodie pocket. Rennie bought the work last month for this show. Other grim works include Sophie Calle’s photographic gravestones – Mother, Father, No. 37 and Baby – installed on the floor rather than the wall – and General Idea’s Black AIDS (prototype). And on the building’s top floor, a single work – Rennie’s first art purchase: Norman Rockwell’s gushingly optimistic On Top of the World. “We were promised that this was life – a boy and girl sitting on top of the world,” says Rennie, standing next to a Kerry James Marshall work referencing lynching in America. “We were all led to believe that it was going to be Norman Rockwell. And this is what we got.” Winter 2015/2016: Collected Works is at the Rennie Collection until April 23 (renniecollection.org). Lederman, Marsha, “Three can’t-miss contemporary-art shows in Vancouver”, The Globe and Mail (online), January 22, 2016 Jungen Brian Carapace, 2009 Jungen is one of the Dane-zaa people, a First Nation of northern Canada. Growing up, he experienced the resourcefulness and material innovation of his people due to economic pressures, as well as the wider commercialization of traditional First Nation craft techniques in response to tourism and globalized consumerism. Jungen, who now lives in Vancouver, has made a number of sculptures that refashion box-fresh consumer goods, such as Nike trainers or golf bags, into objects resembling tribal masks and totem poles. Carapace is a giant turtleshell - inspired by the early science-fiction writings of Jules Verne - made entirely from rubbish bins. He has created a fantastical shelter from objects that were intended for the sanitary disposal of waste (of which Western culture now produces more than ever). Jungen’s sculptures undergo a process of re-mystification that sees consumer culture appropriated by a First Nations sensibility, and not the other way around. Brian Jungen b. Fort St. John, BC, Canada, 1970. Carpace. 2009. Black, blue and green industrial waste bins. h 370 x w670 x d640cm. h 144 x w 264 x d252 in Griffin, Jonathan, et al.The Twenty First Century Art Book, Phaidon Press Limited, New York, NY, 2014, p. 137 Press release BRIAN JUNGEN November 30, 2013 – February 2, 2014 Friday, November 29, 7 p.m. opening BONNER KUNSTVEREIN PRESS CONFERENCE: Thursday, November 28, 2013, 11 a.m. The artist is present BRIAN JUNGEN is regarded as one of Canada’s most important contemporary artists. Solo exhibitions of his works have been shown at such institutions as the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 2005, Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2007, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC, 2009, as well at dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel. In his exhibition at the Bonner Kunstverein, which has been realized in cooperation with the Kunstverein Hannover, JUNGEN presents works from the past decade. Large drums made from parts of car bodies and covered with animal skin rest on ice boxes and tower upwards. In these pieces produced for the present exhibition and that bear the titles Moon, Companion or Mother Tongue, BRIAN JUNGEN (b. 1970 in Ford St. John, British Columbia, lives in Vancouver, Canada) uses freezers as a matter of course as pedestals. Although these objects are employed as exhibition furnishings in the Bonner Kunstverein, they still today belong to the living hunting tradition of Canada’s First Nation People. The artist causes various forms of culture to encounter each other here, allowing these mass-produced articles from Western civilization to be seen in a new light. As the title of one of his early monumental sculptures, Shapeshifter, suggests, formal transformation of everyday objects is at the core of his work. A descendent of Native Americans, JUNGEN defamiliarizes Western culture’s consumer and entertainment goods and refashions them into seemingly archaic sculptures. He intertwines, sometimes literally, Western rituals involving sports with the handicraft traditions of Canada’s First Nation People by cutting up sports jerseys and weaving them into blankets. But in his dealings with tradition and modernism, JUNGEN is not content to just pose questions concerning the present-day identity of indigenous peoples but also uncovers globalization’s blind spot in his sculptural oeuvre. JUNGEN’s transformations of the everyday are also recognizable as a strategy of reappropriation in his works 1960, 1970 and 1980. Stacks of golf bags have been assembled to form totem poles. They allude to the historic success of Canada’s Mohawk Indians, who were able to prevail against the threatened expropriation of their land to build a golf course. These three works point to the fight for their rights as well as to differing understandings of nature and culture. JUNGEN conveys the inadequacy of uniform cultural concepts through his preference for hybrid forms. The works on display in the show reveal the illusionary mechanisms of a living standard oriented on comfort and which finds expression in designer chairs, practical home appliances, fancy automobiles, high-tech sports gear and cushioned golf bags. The artist simultaneously alludes to images of the exotic in order to formulate far-reaching questions dealing with anthropological, economical as well as cultural borderlines. The political in JUNGEN’s work rest the sculpturally staged link between consumer good and objects recognizable as classic artifacts of indigenous culture. With reference to the aesthetic of diversity formulated by Edouard Glissant that defines itself via the diversity of relationships and not via ethnic descent, JUNGEN’s exhibition reflects new forms of reference to the Other in the context of a globalised culture. In this way he puts conventional notions of native and foreign, of the adapted, appropriated and imposed to the test.