b. Fort St. John, British Columbia, Canada, 1970
Walking Heart
2011
Aluminum chairs, American elk hide, tarred twine, steel, and granite
50 × 55 × 24 1/2 in. (127 × 139.7 × 62.2 cm)
Gift of Jacques and Rosana Séguin, 2015 (15.11)
© Brian Jungen. Courtesy of the artist; Casey Kaplan, New York; and Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver
Brian Jungen is best known for his sculptures, which adapt and reenvision found materials from both pop culture and North American Indigenous cultures. In 1998, he began to deconstruct mass-produced (and coveted) Nike Air Jordan sneakers, reshaping their parts into works that resemble North Coast tribal masks. In the mid-2000s, his work shifted again when he started to spend time in the Doig River First Nations reserve, where his Dane-zaa family resides. Though he continued to use found materials, he also culled Dane-zaa craft methods, creating hybrid sculptures fusing Modernist principles with Indigenous raw materials. Walking Heart combines two Eames Aluminum Group chairs with circles of elk hide stretched taut through a traditional drum-making method, resulting in an entirely new and unrecognizable form. By merging vernacular and Indigenous materials, Jungen invites interpretations of the work that touch upon issues such as consumerism, the appropriation of marginalized cultures, and historic and environmental concerns associated with land rights and dispossession.
