Brian Jungen

By using "readymade objects as devices to merge paradoxical concepts," Vancouver artist Brian Jungen attempts to transform these items into a new "hybrid object" that both "affirms and negates" their mass-produced origin, as well as "charts an alternative destination" for them other than a landfill.

Winner of the inaugural $50,000 Sobey Art Award in 2002 - Canada's largest prize given to an artist under the age of 40 every two years - Jungen has been celebrated for producing work that transforms basic consumer items into evocative objects, rich with both humour and meaning often linked to his First Nations heritage.

His solo exhibition, “Cetology,” features a giant sculpture formed as the skeleton of the endangered bowhead whale, which is suspended from a ceiling and fashioned from plastic lawn chairs.

Jungen has also created startling replicas of Northwest Coast native masks constructed from disassembled Nike Air Jordan training shoes. His contemporary works are among those in highest demand for loans from the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Born in Fort St. John, B.C. in 1970 and a member of the Doig River band, of the Dunne-za Nation in northern B.C., Jungen received a diploma of visual art from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver in 1992.

Jungen's latest work chronicled the "continuing struggle to control the production and cultural meaning of alcohol" through fully functioning "distilleries" that produce spirits and are created from household materials in human and animal shapes ("symbolic of myths associated with the spirit world"). Rather than collecting the alcoholic spirits for consumption, Jungen chose to have them channelled into evaporation chambers where they are ignited in consecutive short bursts of flame.

- Christopher Guly