Brandon Bultman’s “Búfalo Blanco” at Robischon Gallery

“The gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts…” C.S. Lewis

Brandon Bultman upends normal with his visual vocabulary on display at Denver’s Robischon gallery. In his first solo exhibition, the emerging artist offers what the gallery press release calls:” a potent, yet thoughtful view of place through both personal and shared histories. Utilizing quintessentially masculine objects as icons of American identity such as the automobile and concrete.”

His installation entitled Búfalo Blanco features a 1959 Buick station wagon, once the symbol of prosperity and the freedom of the open road. This Buick is no longer the ideal, instead it is upside down, rusted and decayed, with upturned wheels, the undercarriage altered by the artist and colonized by native Western grasses, succulents and wildflowers.

“It suggests an eerie vulnerability and displacement,” the gallery states. “Within this context – a shifting of a host of American ideals such as the traditional nuclear family, America as industrial leader and the West as a romantic allegory for limitless freedom for all who arrived – Bultman offers a broader, more universal perspective.”

The quote above is used by the artist to suggest his view of the West and the world.