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Brian Jungen's Cetology I keep thinking about Brian Jungen's amazing work, on display at the Vancouver Art Gallery until April 30, 2006.

I arrived at the exhibition one afternoon, more or less on a whim, with almost no prior knowledge of his background or work. The word that popped into my head after a few minutes of seeing his work was 'magic' - in the sense of calling into being something that previously did not exist in this world; in the sense of recognizing the deep, or true, concealed or hidden nature or true being of something, by a deep understanding of that thing's relations in the world, by stripping away the surface or diversionary aspects, by finding hidden connections.

His larger-than-life teepee is a whimsical example, drawing upon his European and First Nations heritage. He invokes 'traditional' forms in the construction, but uses leather sofas purchased in bulk from a large furniture retailer and stripped of their hides in a process that is more akin to industrial assembly than either conventional notions of 'art' or 'traditional' practices. But the pieces transcend mere reflection on personal identity, teasing us to explore what it really means to express identity via artifacts. What man has wrought, another man can set asunder, and reassemble for his own ends.

Jungen's 'drawings' on drywall are equally amazing. How many billion panels of this ubiquitous construction material have flooded into dwellings, commercial and industrial buildings, and other spaces in our pre-fab environment, before they were re-imagined and re-created as modern surfaces for petroglyphs?

But the most astounding pieces, for me, are the whales. Presented in the style of the xeno-zoological exotica that fired the imaginations of the colonial nations in the 'age of exploration', these pieces document and give witness to great creatures that never existed except in the imagination, which yet reference species that inhabit an evolutionary branch much older than that of humans; and again the very nature of our own species which manifests to threaten the pelagaic mammals, reducing them indeed to the status of mythical, non-existant creatures.

Magic...