The Journey Home: An Examination of Hybridity and Place in the work of Brian Jungen

In the summer of 2011, an exhibition of new works by Canadian Aboriginal artist Brian Jungen, Tomorrow, Repeated, was featured in the Henry Moore Sculpture Centre at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The fender and hide sculptures displayed here employ a hybrid strategy that eludes the iconic markers of Aboriginal identity that have been associated with his work in the past. By analyzing the relationship between hybridity and place in Jungen’s works produced between 1998 and 2011, I consider how the sculptures displayed in Tomorrow, Repeated revisit the political vision engaged by Prototypes for New Understanding, the social and historical issues explored in his early site-­‐specific practice, and the Indigenous epistemologies asserted in his later work. I argue that Jungen’s new works are expressions of the cultural hybridity and reterritorialization of his reserve