“Stripped” (Feb 10 – Mar 9, 2024) is the debut solo exhibition by Pontiac-based artist Brandon Altman, presenting a mixed-media series that examined the idea of fragmentation as a path toward wholeness. Through painting, collage, and assemblage, Altman constructed visual narratives that revealed the tension between memory, identity, and reconstruction.
Working as an outsider artist, Altman approached image-making as a process of discovery rather than design. His works often began with found materials — vintage photographs, torn magazines, and discarded textures — that carried traces of a forgotten era. By layering, sanding, and rebuilding these fragments, he created compositions that felt simultaneously nostalgic and raw, inviting viewers to confront what remains when the surface is stripped away.
The imagery in Stripped drew heavily from the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period of cultural upheaval and social awakening in the United States. Altman described his attraction to this era as “anemoia” — nostalgia for a time one never lived. For him, that decade represented the first visible fractures in the American ideal, where civil unrest, artistic rebellion, and youthful optimism collided in ways that still echo today.
This sense of unresolved history permeated the exhibition. In both figurative and abstract pieces, the human form appeared fragmented, as if caught between eras — a metaphor for collective disillusionment and the persistent search for meaning. The peeling paint, ruptured paper, and exposed edges became visual metaphors for psychological depth and vulnerability, turning deterioration itself into a form of expression.
It was an era when the first tears in the American fabric began to show — unrest, creativity, and a questioning of ideals that still defines us today.”
— Brandon Altman
Ultimately, Stripped was not only a meditation on loss but also a reclamation. By salvaging forgotten images and reassembling them into new contexts, Altman suggested that healing is an act of reconstruction — that wholeness can only emerge through the acknowledgment of what has been broken.
About the Artist
Brandon Altman (b. 1996) is a painter and mixed-media artist based in Pontiac, Michigan. Working primarily through collage and assemblage, he reinterprets historical imagery and materials to expose overlooked aspects of American culture.
As a self-taught outsider artist, Altman’s work bridges nostalgia and critique, transforming remnants of the past into reflections on identity, memory, and the passage of time.
