Subject, Silver, Prism

2011 - Sculpture (Sculpture)

Brian Jungen

location: Vancouver, British Columbia
year born: 1970
gender: male
nationality: Canadian
home town: Ft. Saint John, Canada

There are several elements to Subject, Silver, Prism . Silver ink is applied to blocks of black foam. A simple stand, reminiscent of cheap furniture, supports a drum constructed from deer hide stretched over plastic cooking bowls and held taut by the hide and twine. The tightness of the drum and the stiffness of its table offset the floppy softness of the black foam. The semantic and visual echo between the pots-and-pans drums of suburban children and the deer hide and wood drums of First Nations people are literally bound together in this piece.


Brian Jungen’s works create complex interrelationships between global consumer commodities and traditional First Nations objects. He often physically reworks brand-name products into forms associated with First Nations material culture, such as masks and teepees. More than a simple critique of American-European imperialism, Jungen’s hybrids are irreducible to either trajectory or even a one-way process of influence.


Colors:



Related works featuring themes of: » Appropriation Art, » Biomorphic, » Canadian, » Contemporary Conceptualism

Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger
© » KADIST

Geoffrey Farmer

2009

Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger was Farmer’s first kinetic sculpture that added a cinematic character to an “ever-reconfiguring play presented in real time.” The assembly of various objects and props on top of a large platform constitutes not only a work, but, to a certain extent, a show in itself...

The Carpenter
© » KADIST

Jeffry Mitchell

2012

Poised with tool in hand, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Carpenter (2012) reaches forward, toward his workbench...

Meeting #100
© » KADIST

Jonathan Monk

Meeting #100 is one in a series of text works by Jonathan Monk...

Untitled (TIME)
© » KADIST

Mungo Thomson

2010

In Thomson’s Untitled (TIME) , every front cover of TIME magazine is sequentially projected to scale at thirty frames per second...

Absentia
© » KADIST

Tony Oursler

2012

Continuing Oursler’s broader exploration of the moving image, Absentia is one of three micro-scale installations that incorporate small objects and tiny video projections within a miniature active proscenium...

Bread and Roses
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2012

Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...

Black Hands, White Cotton
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2014

Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...

Blind Spencer (Mirror)
© » KADIST

Douglas Gordon

2002

Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner...

Man and Pet
© » KADIST

Jeffry Mitchell

2012

In Man and Pet (2012), two benign ceramic figures smile sweetly upward...

The White Album
© » KADIST

Mungo Thomson

2008

The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...

Pipe Opening
© » KADIST

Jeff Wall

2002

As suggested by its title, Pipe Opening (2002) depicts a hole in a wood wall exposed by the removal of a pipe...

Retired pilar
© » KADIST

Jin Shan

2010

Retired Pillar represents the death and deterioration of legacy of colonial Shanghai...

South Africa Righteous Space
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2014

South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....

Metaphors of the presence or conversations at the speed of light
© » KADIST

Nicolás Paris

2012

Nicolas Paris studied architecture and worked as an elementary school teacher before he decided to become an artist...

Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura
© » KADIST

Rodney Graham

1996

Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California...

Black Imitates White
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2012

Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...

Captain X
© » KADIST

Luke Butler

2008

In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment...