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. BIOGRAPHY Brian Jungen (b. 1970, Fort St. John, B.C.) currently lives and works in North Okanagan, B.C. He studied art at Emily Carr College of Art and Design, Vancouver. His recent survey exhibition Friendship Centre was presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto in 2019. Other solo exhibitions have taken place at Kunstverein Hannover (2013); Bonner Kunstverein (2013); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2011); National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC (2009); Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2007); Tate Modern, London (2006); Vancouver Art Gallery (2006); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2006); and New Museum, New York (2005). His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including the Liverpool Biennial (2018); Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe (2017); and National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2017, 2013).