This feather-laden table by renowned Canadian artist Brian Jungen examines the many uses and layered meanings of bird feathers in Indigenous cultures of North America. He draws on his family’s ranching and hunting background, as well as his Dane-zaa heritage, to highlight the disappearance of natural resources.
Image Above: Brian Jungen, “The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night,” 2024, 250-year-old French colonial oak table from Baton Rouge, wood arrows, carbon steel points, feathers, artificial sinew, 68 x 85 x 36 in.
Way of the World uses traditional arrows with hardwood shafts and real bird feathers that were shot into an 18th Century Louisiana table. Jungen’s work invites consideration of “Indigenous authority and self-defense, especially in the face of ongoing settler-colonial control.”
‘Way of the World’ was presented in an exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans (November, 2024 to February, 2025), the Triennial of Prospect 6. It was tagged as a “conversation with regions of the world that have long experienced the effects of climate change, labor migration and histories of colonialism.”
In Arms Open Wide (2024), Jungen also examines bird feathers in Indigenous cultures of North America. Created in tandem with Way of the World in New Orleans, Jungen’s chair contains a forest of traditional arrows with hardwood shafts and real bird feathers, all shot by the artist with his hunting bow – from Casey Kaplan gallery here.
See the previous Art Junkie articles on Brian Jungen’s sculptures here.
Brian Jungen is represented by Catriona Jeffries gallery, here.
See the full text of the notes on Brian Jungen’s work at New Orleans on Instagram, here.
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