Nicholas Buffon
Rite Aid
Rite Aid is part of a series of works documenting Nicholas Buffon’s neighborhood, replicating buildings and businesses he frequents within the four blocks of his New York apartment. Made out of foam, paper, glue, and paint, these miniaturized buildings (a bank, a bar, a Laundromat, and the Rite Aid building where Buffon shops) impart a tenderness and a nostalgia that outsizes their diminutive scale. Like works by other artists who recreate objects or elements from their everyday life, Buffon’s storefronts are perfectly imperfect, the wobbled lines reiterating their handmade quality. Capturing these mundane structures in faithful detail, Buffon aims to capture a moment and a place; his final objects reinforce, however, that both space and time are ever changing.
Working in paint, performance, and small, diorama-like wall sculptures, Seattle transplant Nicholas Buffon responds to his context through intimate gestures, examinations, and recreations. While his performances deal with layers of time—the present, historical time, deep time, etc.—his idiosyncratic sculptural works capture, in rapt detail, the concrete world around him.