This iteration of Viewpoints features four related drawings by Brian Jungen (born 1970), a Canadian artist of Swiss and Dane-zaa Nation ancestry. These drawings create visual intersections between pop cultural representations of Native people, extreme sports, and gender tropes. They destabilize essentialist ideas of Native identities and raise questions about the ways indigenous cultures are interpreted and appropriated by pop culture and industry. Jungen takes advantage of the visual ambiguity of the silhouette to create composite images combining visual markers of identity in unexpected configurations. In the artist’s own words, his drawings from this period present “explicit tableaux of queer/Native aggression.”

These drawings are early works of Jungen’s, made just three years after his graduation from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 1995. His work often explores cultural identity in relation to globalized consumerism, with a particular interest in First Nations cultures. Jungen is best known for a series of mask-like sculptures fashioned from Nike Air Jordans, titled Prototypes for New Understanding (1998–2005). Jungen often uses materials related to the athletic industry, reconfiguring the raw materials of athletic products to create hybrid objects.

Below is the featured commentary by University of Washington faculty that accompanies the installation.

Brian Jungen’s drawings play out a series of juxtapositions that bring together markers of Native American culture with objects from the world of contemporary fashion and sports, resulting in figures of cultural hybridity. These sparse drawings of silhouetted figures combine the ephemerality of low-quality paper and the spontaneity of the artist’s sketchbook with the centuries-old tradition of attempting to render human nature via the austere black and white contrast of the silhouette. Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801) championed this mode of representation in his hugely popular Physiognomic Fragments for the Promotion of Human Understanding and Human Love (1775–1778). Lavater insisted on the biological innateness of character, believing it could be documented in the outlined profile of the human face. His work incorporated myriad silhouettes, produced by noted artists of the day. Jungen problematizes this physiognomic tradition by representing hybrid figures influenced by seemingly conflicting cultural codes. Yet the first volume of Lavater’s work, from 1775, already included an “Addendum” by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) that stressed the impact of culture as a determinant of human disposition. Whereas Lavater maintained—in the words of Sigmund Freud—that “anatomy is destiny,” Goethe asserted that human character emerges out of a dynamic interchange between natural givens and the strategic appropriation of cultural codes. “But what exactly constitutes the external side of human beings?” Goethe asked; and he answered: “Certainly not naked form.” He went on to propose that by assimilating the artifacts of culture, humans assume a second nature. “The things that surround human beings do not only have an impact on them; humans also have an influence on these things. . . . Nature forms human beings, but they in turn transform themselves, and these transformations are once again natural.”

Brian Jungen laughs at us and with us. He defies our perceptions about the categories of Indian, gender, and sexuality that make up more than five hundred years of settler colonialism in North America. Four suggestive silhouettes leave us to ponder our own beliefs. “Compromised”: a word, a twisted figure, long braids flying, with a knife on a board. Can we see a youth, not as warrior, a savage/thug, but a person sailing through space, with their own locomotion, mobile, an artist, a carver? “Sure Shot”: a sexually ambiguous figure in an “Indian” headdress, high heels, and clutch purse with arm raised, and a rifle slung over their shoulder, looks down to a prone figure in a provocative pose surrounded by tipis, a baby board and a geodesic form. Likewise, a figure in high heels walking a dog straining to sniff three miniature structures: two tipis and a mushroom. “Diffuse”: a word that evokes the dispersed, a diaspora beyond a singular identity, or complexity beyond any settler’s fixed gaze.

Feathered headdress, rifle, rucksack, hand raised in the sign for friendship (“How!”), all riding on high heels. Pumps and tea-length dress with bow . . . drawn, arrow poised. Braids flying, board catching big air, hunting knife readied to strike.

Native and queer do not intersect in Brian Jungen’s inky silhouettes, they fuse and spark to reveal Indigenous masculinities beyond binaries, other-than-expected, hunter and sportsman in and as drag. These sly images discomfit in the intimation of third gender, but especially in their need for intimacy, for close inspection to perceive their depth, to grasp their complexity, how the shadowlike forms shimmer against dull stereotypes of noble stoics, menacing savages, sad vanquished braves, vanished and vanishing (real) Indian men.

Speaking to their moment in 1995, the images counter the damaging effects of an “epistemology of the closet”—the simplistic binary opposition homosexual/heterosexual that anchors so much twentieth-century Western knowledge—first exposed by queer studies scholar Eve Sedgwick in 1990. They reverberate with activists’ condemnations of the Columbus Quincentennial in 1992. Most striking, they epitomize the courageous “postindian warriors of survivance” heralded by Anishinaabe intellectual and provocateur Gerald Vizenor in 1994. “Postindian” because Jungen’s transformative figures rise from the ruins of tragic inventions to combat the absence of the tribal real. “Survivance” because they confront myths of degraded survival with humor and wonder, coincidence and chance—above all, active, creative presence.

The line drawing (at left) inverts the energy of shadows, the expectations of scale: the everydayness of the cartoonish figure, walking his dog in mini-dress, feather, and heels, dwarfs the verities of imposed tradition—those hidebound teepees—rather than the other way around. Perspective matters in Jungen’s shadowy images, and his choices of caption and commentary cast shadows of their own, “Compromised” and “Diffused,” but a “Sure Shot.”