VSF is pleased to present Snake whisky still life and other stories, a group exhibition curated by Todd Bockley featuring new works by Julie Buffalohead, Andrea Carlson, Jim Denomie, Jonathan Herrera Soto, Pao Houa Her, Tom Jones, Brad Kahlhamer, Postcommodity, Eric-Paul Riege, Lauren Roche, and Cara Romero. This exhibition highlights the wide range of artists within the Bockley Gallery program, especially the Native American and Indigenous artists the gallery has championed for over three decades.
Andrea Carlson’s panoramic painting Cast a Shadow explores the intersection between monument and land through an Indigenous lens. Carlson’s multifaceted, symbolism-heavy painting shares visual resonance with the surrealist dreamscapes that play out in works by Lauren Roche, Julie Buffalohead, and Jim Denomie. Roche’s paintings depict figures and animals co-inhabiting dreamlike settings that simultaneously provoke a sense of peace and unease, while Julie Buffalohead creates stories populated by animal characters which fuse the mundane and the mythical. Jim Denomie also draws heavily upon the human/animal relationship in his work, painting antlered figures (a recurrent motif intended to symbolize, in the artist’s words, “spiritual people”), alongside spiny fish, and woodland creatures that float against turbulent technicolor skies. Denomie’s vocabulary of signs, figures, and symbols is inspired both by his own dreams and his Ojibwe heritage. Brad Kahlhamer’s monumental work Ugh x 4 / 4 x Ugh—part of the artist’s ongoing Super Catcher series—reclaims the figure of the dreamcatcher as a means of personal expression while commenting on the broader commodification of this object by Western culture.
Pao Houa Her, Cara Romero, and Tom Jones all employ photography to explore contemporary cultural identities.
