Travois, Julie Buffalohead’s debut solo exhibition at Dreamsong was co-curated with Jill Ahlberg-Yohe, Curator of the Cafesjian Art Trust Museum, and features five new paintings and seven mixed media sculptures. Interlacing Native American histories and beliefs with personal family narratives, the artist’s imaginative and wryly humorous practice uses allegory and symbolism to reconcile often painful legacies through the transformative and malleable properties of storytelling.
Drawing from Native American oral and material culture, Buffalohead’s painterly renditions of women and animal spirits alongside sculptural objects in rawhide, beads, porcupine quills, dentalium and abalone shells revives and recontextualizes historically elided traditions.