Julie Buffalohead, Artist Statement

My work has focused thematically upon describing a cultural experience, an Indian experience, through a personal language which is a kind of iconography. My imagery is very personal but also provocative. I use storytelling in a specific way to reference figures with traditional significance, where spirit and identity intermingle in nonlinear and interwoven narrative form. These narratives are evocative of a range of concerns I have from historical, political, cultural, as well as personal history, motherhood and childhood. Animals figure prominently in my work.

My imagery is so personal it’s hard to think about the viewer, but I try to be provocative. I use stereotypes because Indians didn’t have a hand in creating them. It’s my way of saying ‘This is not who we are. This is your invention.’

The characters occupy a fictional territory that seem both out of place and time. They are not fairy tales, nor wholly products of fantasy, in the sense that they aren’t simply just invented. In many ways the characterizations are akin to staged facsimiles presenting specific archetypal or oppositional personalities, perhaps, in a way, as a dramatist would.

Nathanael Flink, Artist Statement

Throughout my career, I have worked in series that bridge multiple themes, stylistic qualities, and media. With each successive iteration of works, there are remnants of a practice of seeing. My recent work is a continuation of an exploration of the visual language of color and form.

This work investigates an inherent materiality of the physical spaces people inhabit. There is a narrative to one’s domestic surroundings – the objects, decorations that adorn the home, workplace or even the body. In a few ways, my recent pieces seek to explore the visual process of how we create the mental construct of the interior space we inhabit. The boundary and temporality of the interior space shifts to a perspective of the exterior. When something is not really a piece of furniture but also not really a landscape, but a little of both. There is a fragility to objects in the world that we create.