In our gallery annex,
Buddy Bunting: Desert Landscapes 2024-26

October 10 - December 5, 2026

studio e continues its fall program with the second exhibition in its new gallery annex. Buddy Bunting: Desert Landscapes, 2024-26, the gallery's first project with the mid-career, Seattle-based artist, features a focused selection of paintings of correctional and industrial facilities in the Mojave Desert. Selected by independent curator Melissa E. Feldman, the works mark the culmination of nearly thirty years of field research across California prompted by the incarceration of Bunting's childhood friend. Among subdued colors and soft brush strokes, and never larger than 14 x 18 inches, there’s a quietness and reserve within these troubled scenes of orange uniformed inmates in the exercise yard, or a distant firing range overtaken by the vast beauty of the landscape.

The recipient of a 2025 Gottlieb Foundation Artists Grant, Bunting has shown his work at the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA, PS122, New York, NY, the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA, and in Seattle at G. Gibson Gallery and Prole Drift, among other venues. His work has been written about by Jen Graves, Regina Hackett, Erin Langner, Fionn Meade, and Jerry Saltz, Bunting holds a B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art (1986) and an M.F.A. from Boston University (1988). Originally from coastal Maryland, the artist moved to Seattle in 1997.


View Exhibition Checklist >

Buddy Bunting: High Desert Landscapes, 2024-26

Although I was based in Seattle for much of the 2010s, I had never heard of Buddy Bunting, a local artist, before seeing his work on Instagram over the summer. It was posted by none other than Jerry Saltz, New York magazine’s senior art critic and art world mega-influencer, and it had drawn a record 5,443 likes. I was puzzled as to how this interesting mid-career painter could have eluded me. But the invisibility of regional artists even on their home turf is a complicated matter for another occasion. What draws people’s attention to Bunting’s work is the understated way in which it deals with politically charged subjects: industrial buildings, correctional facilities and detention centers. This project, the artist’s first solo presentation in ten years, offers a calibrated selection of recent examples. They derive from video footage collected on road trips to the California Mojave Desert, each location identified in the title. This is not new territory for Bunting; he’s been scouting the area for these sites and others, including data centers, churches, and the occasional striking landform, since 2011, the year he also switched from expansive ink drawings to small scale oil and shellac paintings on paper, typically 14 x 18 inches.

Bunting’s subtle, quiet approach is uncommon in this era of high-volume political art. Stripped down to basic forms in muted tones, these landscapes of isolation, both natural and manmade, turn stagelike, iconic and timeless. In Sunday morning, High Desert Detention Center (2024) a clean, wide gray road flanked by palm trees leads into a nondescript but not unpleasant complex of boxy, low-slung buildings. Apart from the central stand of large, lushly crowned trees, it would seem that the desert sun has bleached out the details: the edges of curbs and cast shadows are soft, narrow windows become rows of neat blue stitches, and the smoothed out, unblemished buildings and sidewalks glow. If not for the blank, desolate quality, this could be a promotional illustration for a nursing home; however, parking spaces sit empty and the single figure walking is difficult to find, so dwarfed is he by the scale of the complex.

Apart from this quality of mute observation, the current selection also demonstrates the artist’s eye for small moments and peripheral scenes that offer a more immediate experience of places like these, which we hear about but never see firsthand. The recent introduction of the figure—previously the works were always unpopulated--is instrumental in this regard. In one painting a few workers take a break in the shade of a trailer. Using formal tactics to create tension, their casual poses contrast with the imposing geometry of the overall composition with its white rectangular trailer set against a larger brown trapezoidal building spotted with black windows that spans the picture plane from side to side. In another, distant figures—two short straight lines, essentially--inexplicably stand on the embankment of a culvert on the grounds, one presumes, of the California City detention center identified in the work’s title. There is little to distinguish the figures from the posts of the highway guardrail stretching past them or the double culvert outlets at its base, as if people are merely part of the infrastructure of these unfathomable systems.

Bunting’s work brings to mind that of the so-called New Topographic photographers of the 1970s, figures such as Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz who documented the changing face of the American West in small, black and white images of its latest interlopers--industrial buildings, tract housing and highways. Bunting’s long-running series is driven by his own endless fascination with the West, as only an East Coaster can appreciate—Bunting is from rural Maryland—a contradictory space of beauty, possibility, isolation, and depravity.

-Melissa E. Feldman