Brian Jungen Unveils Couch Monster

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Brian Jungen, "Couch Monster: Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch’ill," 2022

bronze (© Brian Jungen; collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; photo courtesy AGO)

The Art Gallery of Ontario has installed a new outdoor sculpture by Brian Jungen, a poetic tribute to the plight of captive creatures  and his first large-scale work in bronze.

The sculpture, Couch Monster: Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch’ill, the gallery's first public art commission, was modelled from second-hand leather furniture and evokes a performing elephant. The sculpture, adjacent to the museum at the corner of Dundas and McCaul streets, is four meters high.

 Jungen, a British Columbia-based artist of European and Indigenous heritage, has created an extensive body of work that engages with both Indigenous materials and traditions, Western art history and popular culture.

He decided to work with leather couches and chairs after seeing discarded furniture piled on Toronto sidewalks. "Finishing the work in bronze is both an homage to British sculptor Henry Moore – whose work Jungen has long admired and engaged with – and a material interest in how, over time, bronze comes to resemble leather," the gallery said.

Jungen said working for a public space has been freeing. “The foundry did an outstanding job translating leather to bronze. Like the leather couches, the more people engage with the work, the more the bronze patina will change over time. I want people to lounge on and explore and really embrace this Couch Monster – it is yours and I am so thrilled to have it live here in the years to come.”

Jungen was inspired by the story of Jumbo, a captive circus elephant killed by a train in St. Thomas, Ont., in 1885. "Jungen calls this creature a couch monster because captivity of any kind is transformative and will inevitably break the spirit and will of the captured," the gallery said. The work’s Dane-zaa subtitle, Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch’ill, translates as “my heart is ripping.”

Jungen completed a full size prototype at his studio in March 2020, and it was transported to the Walla Walla Foundry in Washington state to be cast in bronze. The work arrived in Toronto this month and, at the artist’s request, was blessed in a ceremony led by Dr. Duke Redbird, an Elder of the Saugeen First Nation on Ontario's Bruce Peninsula.

The sculpture, will be accompanied by a descriptive panel, written in Anishinaabemowin and English. The gallery will publish a hardcover catalogue in the fall. 

Jungen, born in 1970 in Fort St. John, B.C., is known for works such as a whale skeleton made from plastic chairs and Indigenous ceremonial objects, including masks, produced from dissected and reconfigured Nike Air Jordan trainers.

His work addresses issues of dispossession and aesthetic appropriation. 

Jungen has had solo shows at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Henry Art Gallery in  Seattle, the Tate Modern in London, the Vancouver Art Gallery and elsewhere.

In 2002, he won the inaugural Sobey Art Award and, in 2010, the Gershon Iskowitz Prize. He graduated from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design.

For more information, visit here.

Source: Art Gallery of Ontario