‘An exercise in the absurd’: This whimsical art center in Salida is all about the unexpected (copy) (copy)
Located in Salida, Colo., ‘Box of Bubbles’ is a whimsical artist resource center and gallery created by Ken Brandon. Within this eclectic space, Brandon fosters a safe haven for creative pursuits, describing it as “an exercise in the absurd.” (Video by Skyler Ballard/ The Gazette)
SALIDA • Ken Brandon often will hear chatter about his square building on the corner, marked in the parking lot by a purple gypsy wagon, a dragon, a robot and a big, rusted drill labeled Astro Auger, among other things speaking to no certain business here.
Passersby might spot the words on the wall: Box of Bubbles. That leads them to the guesses Brandon has heard.
A laundromat? A car wash? Specialty soaps? No, no and no.
For a man who spent his professional career making signs, Brandon could make signs reading “artist resource center” and “gallery.” Those would provide closer clues as to what happens inside this old filling station.
Ken Brandon points up at a carnivorous plant inspired by the film “Little Shop of Horrors” that he made, inside a greenhouse he built off the side of the old filling station that houses Box of Bubbles.
But the unknown is all part of the meaning at Box of Bubbles.
“The way people enter, they’re so anticipatory of not knowing what they’re gonna encounter,” Brandon says. “It’s just an exercise in the absurd.”
People might encounter him behind the counter wearing his long-necked, papier-mâché giraffe head. Around Salida, Brandon is known as that giraffe in a plaid suit riding his bicycle.
Ken Brandon leaves the store with his giraffe head on for a lap around town on his bicycle. Brandon, or rather the bicycle-riding giraffe, is well-known throughout Salida.
He is known for Box of Bubbles — at least among locals who know him as a fixture, rooted here since the 1970s.
Behind the counter, you might spot the awards between books and toys and antiques and modern artwork, including a snake with a lightbulb head: The Cornerstone and Man of the Year awards are both from Salida’s Chamber of Commerce.
For the town proud of its whimsy and art, Brandon stands as “a pillar,” says Jenn Dempsey. She’s the longtime local running Salida Circus.
If not in his giraffe mask, Brandon is found mustachioed and bespectacled, graying into his 70s, looking the grandfatherly part. Rather, “he is the fairy godfather to all of us artists,” Dempsey says. “He opens up his home for us.”
He opens Box of Bubbles for any and all.
For the creator playing with sounds at the moment; for the woman crafting furniture out of bike parts; for the space-themed piece out front by the local artist called Rocket Man; for the maker of the wooden horse skeleton who needed a place for it (Box of Bubbles’ roof was perfect).
And for curious people passing by. They walk in to find nothing for sale, no price tags at all — none of those laundry machines or soaps they were expecting. It’s all about the unexpected.
There’s one of those heaters you’d find at a restaurant patio wrapped in a cage with birds on the outside. There’s an old butter churn, an old trumpet. Some glass buoys here and egg cartons there, along with other packaging Brandon can’t throw away. “I just think it looks really cool!”
A wizard guards the bathroom door. A robot recalls a Pinocchio-inspired character of Brandon’s. The bouncy, rubber balls recall that time he gathered people to launch balls off the town’s volcano-looking mountain in an event called “Ballcano.”
There’s a papier-mâché Kool-Aid man. Other animals join Brandon’s giraffe. Other masks were made for annual parades and celebrations — Earth Day, the Chinese New Year, Cinco de Mayo.
Papier-mâché butterflies and bumblebees flutter and buzz about. The umbrellas are of no use; the clouds are not above but below the canopy.
A big molecule also dangles from the ceiling. “Serotonin,” Brandon says.
Ken Brandon, owner of Box of Bubbles, poses for a portrait in the creative space this month 2024, in Salida, Colo. He describes the space as “an exercise in the absurd.”
All of this one finds by entering the door adorned with circuit boards. A notice is posted: “Do not take offense. It’s just the result of technology gone awry.”
The meaning is anyone’s guess.
One guess: a statement on our modern discourse, disrupted by the internet and algorithms and 24-hour “news” meant to flare emotions instead of inspire the kind of slow, careful thought that once came from reading newspapers or talking to peers — the kind of civil, calm discussions had here at Box of Bubbles. This is indeed a community center, a popular meeting place for groups and other functions.
Maybe that’s too deep a read into the door post.
“I put that up in 2013,” Brandon says. “I was ahead of my time maybe. I was prophesying what we were going into!”
He started Box of Bubbles back then to be a place “that attracted people with different ways of thinking,” he says. “No matter what weird idea they came in with, I would be supportive and encouraging. I didn’t want to burst anyone’s bubbles.”
Bubbles float across the walls inside, spotted amid all of those weird ideas, everything random. You could ponder the meaning of it all forever.
“Life is absurd, let’s face it,” Brandon says. “It doesn’t seem to have any meaning.”
He says that in no pessimistic way. There could be happiness in absurdity, he suggested nearly 10 years ago when he opened Box of Bubbles.
He invited people to an opening seminar, his son remembers.
It was a seminar on “how to fun-ify your life,” Seth says. “Simple things to fun-ify your life. One of the things was an example on how to eat an orange.”
Seth remembers Box of Bubbles being a “bizarre” shift for his dad, a total 180. Undoubtedly he was affected by the end of a marriage that lasted 42 years. He was affected, somehow, by what his life had become.
He was a one-man business making commercial signs and printing T-shirts. He was set on putting his kids through college. He was moving and shaking, networking, serving as the Chamber of Commerce president.
A mannequin adorned in a shirt designed and printed by Ken Brandon sits on one of the shelves at Box of Bubbles.
“He was always working,” Seth says. “If I wanted to hang out with Dad, that meant going to his work.”
Dad would come home for dinner, Seth remembers. “He would come home and eat and then go back because he had signs he needed to paint or shirts he needed to print.”
The work was artistic enough. But growing up on the plains of Las Animas, Brandon always dreamed of drawing cartoons. His parents “didn’t see it as a viable thing,” he says. For a college major, commercial art was the compromise.
From a sign-making shop in Las Animas he ventured off to continue the work in Salida. He arrived in 1978 to find the dusty town of river-cut canyons and mountains attracting a much different character than the miner and railroader who were losing work.
“It was at that time a lot of artists started moving into this area,” Brandon says.
They were “wild and crazy,” he says. They were content without a roof or running water so long as they had their art and the nature around them. Brandon admired them, but he could not be them.
He had creative ideas. But “I had to spend most of my time painting signs and doing work that would pay,” he says.
Flash forward to when the kids were grown, to the man tired of work and facing the uncertainties that follow divorce. Brandon was into his 60s, and it seemed he was starting over.
“I think it was 2012,” he says. “A couple of young whipper snappers convinced me that I needed to go with them to Burning Man that year.”
The desert festival had a profound impact on him, particularly “the attitude of not basing everything upon monetizing it,” he says.
The attitude would prevail at Box of Bubbles. He sells nothing and charges nothing for artists or groups using the space — the book club, the poetry club, the group drawing a model every week.
“I have to remind him constantly to send me an invoice,” Dempsey says. But Brandon seems more interested in giving to the Salida Circus youth learning performance art.
He’s most interested in that kind of art, performance and collaboration. “Ballcano” was an example, that mountaintop launch of balls. Another time Brandon borrowed a rig from Salida Circus to suspend people in the air while they squirted paint on a canvas.
Those things were absurd. As absurd as the lessons on laughing coming up at Box of Bubbles. But maybe it all has meaning.
Maybe there’s meaning in another papier-mâché figure Brandon displays at Box of Bubbles.
“A grumpy guy that’s all about money,” he says. Dollar signs bounce in the guy’s eyes until Brandon pulls a lever, and the dollar signs are replaced by hearts.
Brandon will bring the guy to occasional parades. That’s been Brandon driving the Volkswagen van painted in red, blue and yellow bubbles.
Ken Brandon poses for a portrait in his famous papier-mâché giraffe head this month inside Box of Bubbles on Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2024.
“Most people think it looks like Wonder Bread,” he says. “Which is the point, to wonder!”
If not in the van, Brandon is the giraffe riding his bike around town. And maybe there’s a point there, too.
He has visitors looking at him in that costume now. If only they could look at themselves, he says. “All of you are smiling right now!”
Box of Bubbles is located in downtown Salida, at 135 E. Second St. Hours may vary. Call ahead: 719-539-7443.
For a video from Box of Bubbles, go to gazettedev.gazette.com.
