The artist Brian Jungen—famend for remodeling Nike Air Jordans into Northwest Coast First Nations masks—has received the 2025 Audain Prize for the Visible Arts.
Within the Fairmont Lodge Vancouver’s historic Pacific ballroom on Friday (26 September), the C$100,00 ($71,700) prize—certainly one of Canada’s highest honours within the arts—was awarded to Jungen in a ceremony that managed to be without delay each colonial and decolonial. A bagpiper ushered within the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, Wendy Cocchia, to the tune of Jerusalem. As friends dined on Pacific salmon underneath ornate chandeliers, a Native elder carried out a standard Coast Salish welcome.
Jungen, an artist of combined Dane-Zaa First Nations and Swiss ancestry, creates ingenious sculptural amalgamations of Nike sneakers, sports activities uniforms, plastic furnishings and containers, and different mass-produced objects. Usually evoking visceral connections to conventional Indigenous artistry, together with masks, drums and animals, his multidisciplinary follow challenges, explores and creates dialogue between Indigenous and settler cultures, analyzing the complexities of appropriation and cultural identification in a globalised world. He beforehand received the inaugural version of the Sobey Artwork Award (in 2002) and the 2010 Gershon Iskowitz Prize.
Chosen by an unbiased committee, and established by Michael Audain in 2004, the Audain Prize is offered yearly by the Whistler, British Columbia-based Audain Artwork Museum, with the goal of “elevating artists from British Columbia”.
The group packing the ballroom for Friday’s ebullient ceremony included many previous winners comparable to Chief James Hart, Ian Wallace (certainly one of Jungen’s former academics) and Stan Douglas. When jury member and Polygon Gallery director Reid Shier offered the award, praising Jungen’s work as “imaginative, unpredictable and hauntingly evocative”, the 2 embraced like previous pals. And when Jungen made his acceptance speech, he offered Michael Audain with a pair of beaded moosehide moccasins made by his cousin.
“It’s an honour to recognise Brian Jungen with the 2025 Audain Prize,” says Audain, the chairman of the Audain Basis. “The impression of his artwork is simple. For the reason that late Nineties, Jungen has solid a reputation for himself internationally via his commanding sculptural follow. It’s crucial that we not solely acknowledge the calibre of such achieved artists but in addition proceed to lift their profile right here in British Columbia, in Canada and all over the world.”
Jungen in flip recognised his ties to the native artwork group. In an accompanying documentary quick, he remembered coming to the “large metropolis” in 1988 as an 18-year-old from northern British Columbia and being launched to new concepts like conceptual artwork on the Emily Carr Faculty of Artwork and Design. At one level he had a studio in Vancouver’s downtown east aspect and supported his inventive follow by working at Canada Submit. Whereas his early work concerned drawing and portray, “I didn’t actually begin making objects till I did a residency on the Banff Centre at 28,” recalled the artist, who’s now 55 years previous.
Impressed by damaged objects he encountered on the streets of Vancouver, he mentioned, “I made these Nike masks, which I’m sort of tied up with for the remainder of my life.” That sequence, Prototypes for New Understanding (1998-2005), launched his profession. A type of masks, Variant #1 (2002), is within the everlasting assortment of the Audain Artwork Museum and can go on present there subsequent month in From Sea to Sky: The Artwork of British Columbia. “It was an enormous turning level for me,” Jungen mentioned. “I used to be out of the blue being flown all over the world and getting museum exhibits.”
Brian Jungen, Sofa Monster: Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch’in poor health, 2022 Assortment of the Artwork Gallery of Ontario. Fee, with funds from Authorities of Canada/Gouvernement du Canada, Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program, The Renette and David Berman Household Basis, Charles Brindamour & Josée Letarte, Bob Dorrance & Gail Drummond, Angela & David Feldman, Hal Jackman Basis, Phil Lind & Ellen Roland, T. R. Meighen Household Basis, Companions in Artwork, Paul & Jan Sabourin, an nameless donor, and with funds by change from Morey and Jennifer Chaplick, 2022. © Brian Jungen
The artist later purchased a ranch in British Columbia’s rural Okanagan Valley, the place he lived and had a studio for 9 years. Throughout that point, he created his first large-scale public work for the Artwork Gallery of Ontario, Sofa Monster: Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch’in poor health (2002),an enormous bronze sculpture forged fromsecond-hand leather-based furnishings shaped into the determine of a performing elephant. Impressed by an escaped circus elephant “compelled into cultural slavery” that he felt a “big affinity with”, Jungen drew parallels to the business artwork world the place “if one thing doesn’t promote, it simply will get thrown into storage”.
4 years in the past, he reached one other turning level when his ranch and his total archive—stuffed into round 900 Air Jordan bins—burned to the bottom throughout a wildfire. Fortunately, a lot of his early work was collected by Bob Rennie, who donated it to the Nationwide Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
Brian Jungen, The best way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die however within the affairs of males there isn’t any waning and the midday his expression alerts the onset of night time, 2024. Courtesy the artist, commissioned by Prospect.6 Photograph: Benjamin Sutton
“It was a time to resume,” Jungen tells The Artwork Newspaper of the lack of his ranch and archive. He at present lives in a cabin in Moberly Lake in Northern British Columbia and has no studio, however he says he’s now producing extra public artwork because it doesn’t require one.
“I’ve additionally began making arrows in wooden and carbon fibre fletched with feathers,” he says. “As a result of I follow archery now the place I dwell up north, I’ve been firing the arrows into totally different objects and made a bit for Prospect New Orleans and did a efficiency with the arrows in February in New York.” He says he was impressed he mentioned by the Smithsonian’s Nationwide Museum of the American Indian, the place he exhibited in 2009, and its assortment of arrows.
Jungen provides: “I need to get again to creating issues with my very own palms.”
