ABOUT THE ARTIST

Brian Jungen was born in 1970 on a family farm north of Fort St. John, British Columbia, to a Swiss immigrant father and a mother from the Dane-zaa Nation. He moved to Vancouver in 1988 to study at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, and a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1998 became a turning point in his practice. There, he began Prototypes for New Understanding, the series that made his name: sculptures built by disassembling Nike Air Jordan sneakers and reassembling them into forms that recall Northwest Coast Indigenous masks. He has spent the decades since in the same spirit, taking apart the objects of everyday consumer life (sports equipment, furniture, clothing) and rebuilding them into forms that evoke Indigenous masks, drums, and animals. Bush Capsules continues a line of work that reaches back to Bush Capsule, an early piece from 2000, and Jungen's long-standing interest in the architecture of shelter. His work has been shown at Tate Modern, the New Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, among others, and he was the first winner of the Sobey Art Award in 2002.