Hunting party
Bryan Christiansen
By Brad Bynum, 9.15.11, RN&R
Bryan Christiansen remembers killing his first deer. It was in South Dakota, where he grew up, and he was 13 or 14 years old. “It was a traumatic experience,” he says. “Traumatic but triumphant … I don’t hunt anymore. It just doesn’t feel right.”
But hunting has now become part of his art making process. He scours the streets and alleyways of Reno, hunting for discarded furniture—bed frames, couches and easy chairs—and, in a neat inversion of hunting, he takes those dilapidated, unwanted items, breaks them down, and resurrects them as representational artworks—more specifically, as sculptures of deer and other game animals.