Brian Jungen & Duane Linklater: Modest Livelihood

October 13 - February 3, 2013

Artists' talk Jan 23, 2013, 6:30 pm at the Logan Center
Organized by the Open Practice Committee and followed by a reception in the gallery

Logan Center Exhibitions presents Brian Jungen and Duane Linklater's Modest Livelihood, a film project that departs from a hunting trip on Dane-zaa Territory in Northern British Columbia that the artists undertook in Fall 2011. The footage has been translated into two film works, which do not fit easily into any single genre but raise questions of self-determination, self-representation and the sharing of knowledge.

The artists first met and began to think about documenting a hunting trip while on a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada. After a trial with video documentation, they settled on engaging the cinematographer Jesse Cain to shoot on Super 16mm film as they hunted with the guidance of Jungen's uncle, Jack Askoty. Modest Livelihood marks their first foray into film proper.

For both artists the act of hunting remains fundamental to their First Nations identity (Jungen is of Dane-zaa and European ancestry while Linklater is Omaskêko Cree), yet it is deeply fraught with the debate over the current legal status of ancestral ways of living. In 1999, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld First Nations' rights to fish and hunt on their own territory, but with the proviso that this activity did not exceed the sustenance of a “moderate livelihood,” which “includes such basics as ‘food, clothing and housing, supplemented by a few amenities,’ but not the accumulation of wealth.” The wording of the decision was highly controversial among native communities, given their dispossession and decimation at the hands of colonizers. As they carved nine hours of footage into a 50 min. film, Jungen and Linklater gave this legal jargon a poetic twist, asserting their own limits; hence Modest Livelihood.

Silent and slow, Modest Livelihood (2012) follows the artists as they follow an animal, speaking the language of naturalism to a natural landscape. In the steady gaze and the strong silence, one can detect certain echoes of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979) or his more auto-biographical Mirror (1975); attempts to document First Nations lives made by the National Film Board of Canada, such as Tony Ianzelo and Boyce Richardson’s Cree Hunters of the Mistassini (1974); and the deployment of earlier ethnographic lenses, like those of Edward S. Curtis or Robert J. Flaherty who made Nanook of the North in 1922. But listing such references one realizes this may be a compulsive response to the utter discomfort of confronting a film that is as stripped of effect as the moose may be stripped of its skin.

The film recently premiered as a chapter of dOCUMENTA(13), organized at the Banff Centre for the Arts in the Summer and Fall of 2012. Its subsequent presentation at the Logan Center gives both artists another chance to combine working methods: Jungen and Linklater experiment with a fragment of their original footage, constructing a looped projection in the adjacent gallery provisionally titled lean (2012).

The exhibition aims to extend the dialogue between Jungen's predominantly sculptural practice and Linklater's interest in the moving image, pedagogy, and performance. It is also an opportunity to learn from their shared attempt to find forms for experiences, which are particular to their positions as contemporary First Nations artists, yet impact the broader cultural ecology.

Curated by Monika Szewczyk, Visual Arts Program Curator, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.

Sponsored by The Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, The Open Practice Committee, and UChicago Arts.

Brian Jungen (b. Fort St. John, Canada, 1970) is an artist based in Vancouver and Fort St. John. His work employs an economy of repurposing and reinvention that he has ascribed to growing up on Dane-zaa territory in Northern British Columbia. He has gained international renown for his shape-shifting sculptural practice, which involves the transformation of symbolically charged materials (ranging from mass-produced commodities to hide or cedar wood) into forms that confound First Nations iconography with modernist art and design and the language of branding. Jungen’s desire to explore cultural plurality and the effects of a global trade in mass-produced objects is reflected in one of his most famous works, Prototype for New Understanding, a series of 23 West Coast Native-inspired masks made from reconstituted Air Jordan basketball sneakers. Animals, in their various roles as mythical figures, co-habitants of the planet and subjects to confinement and consumption, continue to return as evidenced in his series of whale skeletons made from white plastic chairs or, Carapace (2009-2010), a massive turtle shell constructed out of industrial wastebins. His contribution to the Kassel chapter of this year's dOCUMENTA(13) was a dog run in the Karlsaue Park. Solo exhibitions of his work have been mounted by the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2011); National Museum of the American Indian, New York (2010); and Tate Modern, London (2006). In 2004-2005, the Vancouver Art Gallery organized a major survey of his works which travelled to the New Museum, New York; Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam and Villa Stuck, Munich. Jungen received a diploma in Visual Arts from the Emily Carr Institute of Design in 1992.
Duane Linklater (b. Moose Factory, Canada, 1976) is an Omaskêko Cree artist living and working in North Bay, Ontario. He has exhibited and screened his work at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton; Gallery 101, Ottawa; Anthology Film Archives, New York; and OK Video Festival, Jakarta. His 2012 solo exhibition at the Or Gallery in Vancouver, entitled Beothuck Building, involved a constellation of works relating to the artist's travel to the province of Newfoundland to research the landscape and the officially extinct language of the Beothuck people of the region. The two words in the title, which are also the name of an office building in St. John's, Newfoundland, were offered to four other artists and academics (Raymond Boisjoly, Kim Tallbear, Joanna Malinowska and David Horvitz) for responses that unfolded over the course of four evenings at the gallery. Having worked across media (most consistently in painting, film, and performance), Linklater's approach is marked by an attention to disappearing knowledge and the involvement of others in processes of teaching and learning that are rooted in oral traditions. The artist received his Master of Fine Arts from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, New York in 2012.
Special Thanks to Jack Askoty, Bill Brown, Zachary Cahill, Jessie Cain, Cynthia Cowan, Hannah Givler, Mike Gibisser, Katherine Harvath, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Goshka Macuga, Jesse McKee, Kitty Scott, Shauna Thompson, William Michel, Mitch Marr, Scott Moore, Jim O'Chiese, Lauree Pizzale and family, Haynes Riley, Dieter Roelstraete, Tara Wood, Yechen Zhao, Treaty 8 and Treaty 9.