(does this look familiar to you?)
This is from an art show that happened a while back. It was done by Brian Jungen. Here is a quote from the Washinton Post about the exibit and the man behind it:
You could say that Brian Jungen, an Indian artist of the Dunne-za First Nation in British Columbia, is a classic shape shifter: He’s taken Air Jordan running shoes and turned them into ritual animal masks.
Or you might say he’s been possessed by the trickster spirit: He’s assembled the skeleton of a whale, sacred to so many of this continent’s first peoples, out of fragments of cheap plastic lawn chairs.
Those red, black and white Air Jordans, pulled apart and reassembled into masks, look a lot like the most famous Indian carvings of British Columbia and Washington state — but what’s that to Jungen? The coastal groups that make such carvings have almost nothing to do with his people, who occupy farmlands a thousand miles away, on the other side of the Rocky Mountains.
They have a slide show of what was shown. Very clever stuff. First seen on BookOfJoe
Comment
You haven’t missed the show yet.
The exhibition “Brian Jungen: Strange Comfort” is currently at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC until Aug. 8, 2010.