Brian Jungen
Vancouver Art Gallery
Through April 30.
The young Vancouver artist Brian Jungen made a powerful impression on Seattle in 2003, the year the Henry Art Gallery showed his massive whale skeleton made of plastic patio chairs, and Seattle Art Museum included his transformation of Nike Air Jordans into faux native masks (which also had been seen at the Henry) in the sweeping Baja to Vancouver exhibition. Now, 35-year-old Jungen has a major retrospective up at the Vancouver Art Gallery; the show opened first at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. He has an upcoming installation at the Tate Modern in London. Jungen is, in short, on fire.
But his work is cold. The Vancouver survey is full of eloquent, controlled critiques of various cultural classifications—native versus modern, natural history versus art history, etc. An enormous teepee, made on-site of 11 dismantled black leather couches, is both a reference to fellow Vancouver artist Ken Lum’s sculptures of tilted furniture and a declaration about the way museums present objects, as the entry is closed and visitors can only wander around the shelter. Jungen was born to a Swiss father and a First Nations mother, and his works pit commercialism against fetishized spirituality until each cancels the other out, leaving the viewer in a middle zone that may be more honest but is also more blank. He is a debunker, not an expressionist. There is one emotionally charged exception: Jungen asked people on the street to draw what came to mind when they thought of native art, then enlarged the racist drawings and carved them deeply into the gallery walls as if inflicting injuries.
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Divergent Paths
Crawl Space
Through April 9.
Seattle artist W. Scott Trimble’s latest work, his first large-scale installation, is telescopic, zooming in and out of life-sized scale. Titled Divergent Paths, it takes up the entire gallery at Crawl Space.
The boardwalk begins underfoot when you enter, then tapers to miniature size as it splits and its offshoots curve around the room and up the walls, arteries becoming capillaries until each ramp, staircase, skybridge, and tightrope hits its own tiny terminal point: a papal/electric high-backed chair, a closed or open door or series of doors, a charred pit. The swarming city of narratives is made largely of one basic, repeated form: the rectangular wood plank. As the large planks taper into the smaller planks, the paths curve sharply, and these curves continuously refresh the driving thrust of the scene, like the longed-for downhills in a bicycle trip.
At the opening, where Trimble wore a necktie made of little wood planks, he revealed that he began this work—which is more stately than his earlier, kinetic sculptures—after breaking up with a woman he intended to marry. The circumstances and the symbolism of the title seem obvious, but their physical effects are finely wrought and absolutely enchanting.
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Pardon Me
Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver
Through April 23.
This little international group show is a surprise wonder, curated by the Charles H. Scott Gallery’s Cate Rimmer, capturing connections, disconnections, and near misses between artists and their subjects.
There’s a sense of strange, misty distance in Shizuka Yokomizo’s photographs of apartment dwellers. This is no trick of the camera. The artist left notes for first-floor residents inviting them to stand in front of their window at a set time. The images that result from these anonymous liaisons are shot through with curiosity and desire. They also set the tone for the show’s tension between performative and documentary forms of interaction.
Vancouver duo Hadley + Maxwell, who showed last year at Howard House in Seattle, ask for complicated relationships with their subjects, whose homes they rearrange before making photographs of the interventions. The artists then write intensely beautiful narratives about the process in the form of letters to the subjects. (In their Seattle show, these letters were tucked away in a binder.)
Mathew Sawyer also writes letters, of a sort. He adds spare and dramatic stories as postscripts to pieces of mail he steals from and then returns to post boxes. To a receipt for rent payment, he attached a tale of a son sitting with his father during his final moments: “When they finally came, my hand was shaken, I was the man of this house.”
