Wild West at BDGA is a multi-disciplinary art and design installation orchestrated by David Buckley Borden that focuses on America’s conflicted relationship with its landscape and natural resources.
The installation sets aside the popular narrative of inflated romance and violence associated with young America’s western frontier experience for a narrative that instead positions the “Wild West” in terms of regional landscape ecology.
The project has a lot of layers: nerdy content in an unlikely setting, art and design installation integrated into a retail environment, and blurred lines between product design and art commerce. Although the show can be seen as an art and design exhibition, it’s also an exhibition of skills and talent seeing as most of David Buckley Borden’s collaborators on this project do not have an art background and would not likely self-identify as artists in the traditional sense.
Instead, the install features a communication designer, an architect, product designers, a wood worker, a leather worker, an advertising executive, a graphic designer, and couple of landscape architects. Hence how the show ended up with an interesting multi-layered group of high quality work, such as custom shelves, cowhide maps, and sculptural wood maps derived from spatial data.
This unique and talented group of creative professionals has essentially abstracted their differing skills sets and applied it to a creative opportunity.
Check out the short flip book video of the show.