Space is a participant : strategies of activation and presence in the contemporary practice of Brian Jungen ...

• Main Author: Ryner, Denise
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2014
• Subjects: Dane-zaa
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0166939; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0166939

Erasure and dislocation have proven to be effective catalysts for the work Court (2004) and the unrealized work The Treaty, both by Dane-zaa/Canadian artist Brian Jungen. Jungen's large-scale and multi-sited installations collapse and map diverse sites onto each other in order to engage with space as an element activated by labour, marginality, exploitation, ritual and presence. The site of Jungen's 2004 installation Court, was a gallery in a former garment sweatshop in Harlem, New York. Court's activation by Harlem's spaces of leisure and labour such as the basketball surface, the factory floor and the art gallery, gave form to local narratives of marginalization, exploitation and racism, thereby complicating exhibition viewers' assumptions of exclusion from Jungen's critiques. Similarly, Jungen's proposed work in 2006 for the Tate Modern in London entitled The Treaty intended to link the artist's home near Fort St. John in northeastern British Columbia to England by invoking a space that, through an 1899 ...