Chris Ballantyne’s work focuses on vernacular architecture and observation of the American landscape.  Banal features of suburban and industrial zones are sources for paintings that highlight the quirky and absurd.  Ballantyne states that, “Growing up in a military family and moving to different parts of the country, there was a certain familiarity to the kinds of houses and neighborhoods. They were a series of suburban developments built in separate regions of the country, always on the outskirts of larger cities, at the exit ramps of interstate highways, and all very similar in age and design.  My own notions of space developed out of this cultural landscape which was striving for an indidvidual sense of personal space,  consciously economic, and somewhere between urban and rural.” Dysfunctional structures are flawless in their strangeness, made beautiful through symmetry, simplified lines and flat, subdued colors. Ballantyne eliminates detail to emphasize the subtleties of the way we experience space and our attempts at containment. He extends these concepts further by expanding the imagery of his paintings beyond the picture plane and onto the surrounding walls. “Most of my works involve combinations of various places, drawn from memory. As well, my own interests in skateboarding and surfing altered how I saw  the use of these structures ranging from empty pools, sidewalk curbs, to ocean jetties in a way that tied in to my sense of this larger push and pull between culture and nature.” With shrewd restraint, Ballantyne accentuates the antisocial effects of our built environment with a hint of humor and plenty of ambiguity. A curious emptiness permeates the work of Chris Ballantyne. Graphically rendered buildings, pools, parking lots, and fences take on new meanings and amplified significance, isolated on flat fields of color.

COLOR / STORY Brandi Katherine Herrera is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, and translator, whose work in text, image, and sound explores the poetics of space. She is the author of Mutterfarbe, a full-length work of color theory, experimental translation, photography, and poems using Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre as a primary source; and Natürlicher, a chapbook-length work of color theory, experimental translation, and poems (both Broken Cloud Press, 2016); a co-author of MAR, a collaborative artist book + limited-edition chapbook of photography, marrings, and poems (Lute & Cleat, 2018); and the co-editor of The Lake Rises, a Witness Post Series anthology of poems (Stockport Flats, 2013). Her work is held in the Seattle Art Museum’s permanent collection, Yale University’s Faber Birren Collection of Books on Color, UCLA’s Louise M. Darling Library, University at Buffalo’s Poetry Collection, and Reed College’s Special Collections & Archives, and has been featured in a number of solo + group exhibitions, performance series, and publications, including: the Seattle Art Museum, Cube Gallery, 23 Sandy Gallery, Creative Mornings, Poetry Press Week, Pure Surface, The Volta, Octopus Magazine, The Common, Poor Claudia, Word/For Word, Thru Magazine, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, and Womenspeak PDX.

Giulia is an animator, art director and illustrator.

Visual artist and designer

Louise Reinke is Paris based artist from Frankfurt in Germany. Her photography values humanity and expresses her affection towards life and nature altogether.