constanza vallese

Jessica Yatrofsky is a New York-based photographer, filmmaker and author, known for work exploring body politics, beauty, and gender. She received her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design and published her first photography monograph, I Heart Boy, with powerHouse Books in 2010 and her sec-ond photography monograph, I Heart Girl, in 2015. In 2017, she published her debut collection of poetry titled Pink Privacy. Jessica’s photographic work is part of the permanent collection with the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art and the Musem of Sex in New York City. Her photography work has been exhibited overseas and her film work has been both televised and screened at film festivals internationally. Jessica’s writing has also been featured in publications such as Forbes and New York Magazine.

Jason Koxvold is a creative director at StrawberryFrog, artist, and co-founder of Renegade Pencils, an organisation that helps give children access to a creative education. His work has been exhibited at MoMA, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, RESFEST, SXSW and the Los Angeles Film Festival. He has held creative workshops in Singapore; glued reflective balls to interns in San Francisco; spent hundreds of hours photographing landfills in Tokyo; driven an ambulance across Europe and Central Asia to raise money to build schools; raced motorcycles in the Scottish grand prix series; been interviewed by the Russian FSB in a holding cell in the Arctic Circle, and by the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Kentucky.

Artist and Creative Producer from Ireland, living in Brooklyn NY.

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.