Ballantyne’s work, encompassing both painting and small-scale sculpture, is deeply rooted in her personal experiences, particularly her experience with temporal lobe epilepsy, which has fueled her interest in examining the role of feelings and sensory experience in the inner life of herself and others. Her paintings often feature figures, animals, and cultural iconography, utilizing deep colors, strong symbolism, and specific layering techniques to evoke a powerful sense of emotion and spirituality. The layering of images, allowing old images to inform new ones, mirrors how past experiences shape our present ways of acting and seeing the world. Ballantyne emphasizes her process of free association and a lack of preliminary drawings, viewing the painting itself as a mirror reflecting her inner life and recurrent existential questions. She highlights the feeling of wholeness she experiences when her painting process is true and honest to herself, connecting this to psychological and spiritual concepts like attachment theory, codependency, and Zen Buddhism.

CHRISTINA BALLANTYNE (b.1990, Houston, TX) is a Los Angeles-based artist. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021, where she was a recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler award. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Untitled Houston, Julius Caesar (Chicago), Hair & Nails (Minneapolis, MN), Sulk (Chicago, IL), and Martha’s Contemporary (Austin, TX). Group exhibitions include NADA Miami, Felix Art Fair (Los Angeles, CA), Chez Max et Dorothea (Los Angeles), Make Room LA (Los Angeles, CA), and Andrew Raefacz (Chicago, IL). Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic, Artsy and the Austin Chronicle.
http://www.christinaballantyne.com Instagram: @xtinaballantyne2.0

 

Ish Lipman’s expressive oil paintings of sky, sea, and rolling hills populated by tiny figures investigate the complexities of the sublime in relationship to the contemporary landscape. Drawing upon our growing alienation from the natural world, Lipman’s paintings seek to explore this rift, aiming to examine the various anxieties and reveries that emerge from healing this inner divide. The paintings emerging from these investigations have a similar existence to those moments between sleeping and waking, where the world is colored with the aftertaste of a vivid dream.

Ish Lipman (b. 1995, San Francisco, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist. He graduated from the University of California Santa Cruz in 2018 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Drawing in 2019. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Harpers (NYC, NY), Harpers (East Hampton, NY), Long Story Short (Paris, FR), Andrew Rafacz (Chicago, IL) Praz-Delavallade( Los Angeles, CA). Group exhibitions include NADA Miami, Nada New York, Make Room LA (Los Angeles, CA), Hair and Nails at Easy Does It (Los Angeles, CA).

http://www.ishlipman.com Instagram: @ish_lipman