Join us for the opening reception of Travois, Julie Buffalohead’s debut solo exhibition at Dreamsong, featuring new paintings alongside fiber and rawhide sculptures. Drawing from Native American histories and beliefs, personal narratives, and current events, Buffalohead’s thoughtfully moving and wryly humorous practice uses allegory and symbolism to explore social and political injustice, family history and cosmological belief-systems.
Depicting scenes that frame and excavate the persistence of the past in our present is a hallmark of the artist’s practice. So too is the powerful agency that we retain in how our stories are told, the lessons they hold and the heroes they ordain. In the work Travois (2025), the childhood dog of Buffalohead’s father – shot and killed by his brother during their Oklahoma youth – pulls a travois [1] laden with pillows, cushions, turtles, rabbits, a raccoon and a monkey. Standing in for the artist and her siblings, the animals rest comfortably on the building blocks of living room forts while the charge of carrying them through childhood is laid on the weary back of a faithful pet. While the painting’s precise meaning is open to interpretation, the hound’s unassailable dignity has survived the tests of time. To safeguard passage – from childhood to adulthood, from the reservations of Oklahoma to beyond, from the iniquities of history to the demands of the present – requires Herculean efforts from those bearing the necessary inner strength.
[1] A travois an a-framed wooden structure lashed to dogs, horses and other pack animals for the transport of goods. It was traditionally used by members of the Plains Indian tribes.
