Brian Jungen unveils Banff Centre-commissioned sculpture June 16

The ghosts on top of my head • Thursday, June 16 
Artist’s Talk: 7 p.m. • Official unveiling and reception: 8 p.m. 
Kinnear Centre for Creativity and Innovation • The Banff Centre 
Presented as part of the 2011 Banff Summer Arts Festival

Banff, Alberta, June 7, 2011 -- In a series of three public sculptures, Vancouver-based artist and Banff Centre alumnus Brian Jungen has created a set of finely designed works that reference both the natural world, and the modernist furniture of Harry Bertoia. The ghosts on top of my head was commissioned for Canada Plaza, in front of the new Kinnear Centre for Creativity and Innovation, opened last summer at The Banff Centre. Three benches made of white, powder-coated steel, they take the forms of antlers – caribou, elk, and moose.   

This work was commissioned as a gift of Doug, Linda, Sarah, and Ian Black, long-term supporters of The Banff Centre, and it’s illustrative of Jungen’s characteristically meticulous craftsmanship and study of design. As described in the introduction to his 2010 show at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, Jungen “charges ordinary, useful objects with layers of meaning, exploring and transgressing the boundaries of what they had been, and what they’ve become.”  

Brian Jungen lives and works between Vancouver and Fort St. John, B.C., and has shown nationally and internationally in major solo and group exhibitions. Using reclaimed materials and creating a hybridity of meaning, Jungen’s work evokes cultural traditions, and points to the link between the social and environmental effects of our globalized trade in mass-produced objects, and the power that those commodities transmit. He has had solo exhibitions at museums and galleries including the National Museum of the American Indian, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Museum Villa Stuck (Munich), Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal, the Tate Modern, and the Vancouver Art Gallery.      

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