Casey Kaplan
Hammer Contemporary Collection: Brian Jungen
AUG 14–OCT 31, 2021
An installation of consumer goods and materials questions depictions of Native American experience in popular culture.
In The Evening Redness in the West (2006), Canadian artist Brian Jungen addresses the legacy of colonialism and violence in Hollywood Westerns. Informed by the artist’s Dane-zaa First Nations heritage and influenced by indigenous craft and iconography, the work exemplifies Jungen’s use of consumer goods and materials to question depictions of Native American experience in popular culture. In this makeshift tableau, leather seats are reconfigured into a saddle situated atop an improvised wood plinth. Skulls sewn from worn softballs, adorned with faded racist Indian insignias familiar within the vocabularies of sport in North America, flank the central object. These handcrafted and re-fabricated elements connect to a DVD system and amplifier that plays the audio from popular Western films. Detached from the original film’s images, the sounds narrate a story of conflict in the western frontier. Each rumble, gunshot, and climatic boom activates the scene, causing the makeshift saddle-horse to buck, tremble, and move about the gallery. The Evening Redness in the West takes its name from the subtitle of Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 epic novel Blood Meridian, a meditation on violence during the Mexican-American Wars of the late 19th century.
Hammer Contemporary Collection: Brian Jungen is organized by Aram Moshayedi, Robert Soros Curator, with Nicholas Barlow, curatorial assistant.
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