In Minneapolis:
CHRIS LARSON Sculpture 2025-2026 has been extended until Sunday, April 26th.
Join us April 16th at 6pm for Chris Larson in conversation with Siri Engberg, curator of visual arts at Walker Art Center.
More on Chris Larson Sculpture 2025-2026 at the bottom⬇️
*In New York:
HAIR + NAILS NYC
39 Henry St. New York, NY 10002
OPEN GALLERY HOURS: walk-ins welcome: Fridays/Saturdays/Sundays 1:00-6:00 starting April 10 through May 9. Also, appointments can be scheduled 7 days/week via hairandnailsart@gmail.com.
HAIR+NAILS presents Appears to be Dreaming, a duo exhibition of works by Rachel Collier and Christina Attié Ballantyne that explores the resilience of abstraction as a means for existing within a spectrum of realities. Through a variety of techniques, both painters converse with the unknown, bringing to light a harmony of discourse mediated via the canvas. Both artists will be present at the opening reception.
Thursday, May 9, 2026, at HAIR+NAILS NYC, 39 Henry St.
RACHEL COLLIER Waves on Waves (2026). acrylic, oil, and wool on canvas. 44”x 24”
CHRISTINA ATTIÉ BALLANTYNE New Paths (2026). oil on linen. 42”x 30”
Rachel Collier works between painted and woven fields of abstracted forms. For Collier, the language of abstraction is inherently romantic and powerful in its opposition to a world of rigid forms and ideas. These forms emerge from a fertile darkness, a space where the inscrutable is rife with meaning. The painted pastel fields of shifting colors, intersected by flattened planes from the grid, bring forth the metaphysical and philosophical aspects of the painted world. Attention is divided between the performative act of intuitive painting and the ineffable qualities of translational forms, speaking to self-generated imagery as a site of infinite abundance.
Christina Ballantyne’s work interweaves the intricacies of memory with the processing of latent emotion. These tender works explore the possibilities of painting as a meditative outlet for emotional expression and catharsis. By approaching painting in this somatic manner, Ballantyne spreads, scrapes, scumbles, and washes without the aid of brushes, using hands and rags instead, leaving us with luminous paths and swaths of vibrating color imbued with emotion and movement. The physicality of this process is a transference of psychological observations, a world in which all things exist in relation to one another. From this field of phenomena, a deep sense of bodily knowing emerges.
Both artists come to painting as a site of liberation. For Collier, it is in the act of refusal of hard form, favoring the open-ended approach instead, seeking abundance and expansion over arriving at an anticipated destination. For Ballantyne, painting is also a site of freedom; like Collier, she is not looking for a legible answer but is painting in service of the act of painting itself. To manipulate and express is, in many ways, the summit of the practice; the finished image is rather the witness and proof of the experience. In Collier’s and Ballantyne’s work, there is a strong tether to the threshold of the seen and unseen. The paintings that emerge from this space are objects imbued with ambiguity, but are also entities familiar to themselves, as if capable of their own private existence. Appears to be Dreaming references the activation of a painted world, a world in which paintings are themselves evidence of energies capable of their own autonomy. Each painting in this exhibition has an inherently emotive power, pulling us, the viewer, into a state of increased awareness and reverence for sources unknown.
ARTIST BIOS:
Christina Attié Ballantyne (b. 1990, Houston, TX) is a Los Angeles-based artist. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Painting & Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Hair & Nails (New York City, NY), Untitled Fair (Houston, TX), 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), Ivory Gate Gallery (Shanghai, China), Make Room LA (Los Angeles, CA), and Andrew Rafacz (Chicago, IL). Christina has served as an adjunct professor at East Los Angeles Community College and Minneapolis Institute of Design. She has been a recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Award (2021) and lectured at the Brand Art Library in Los Angeles (2025). Alongside artist Ishmael Lipman, she founded Ouroboros, an online educational platform focused on providing affordable graduate-level education to emerging artists.
http://www.christinaballantyne.com
Instagram: @xtinaballantyne2.0
Rachel Collier (b. 1981) is an artist born and based in Minneapolis. Collier’s work is rendered in expansive color, transcribing ecstatic realms that populate our shared consciousness. Repeated abstract forms anchor familiar psychic landscapes to our physical world, stirring the spirit in preparation for advancement or departure. While referencing the languages of maps and topography, her compositions deconstruct from the grid to imagine transcendent space. Collier has her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and recent exhibitions and publications include HAIR+NAILS Gallery (Minneapolis, MN), Felix Fair (LA, CA), NADA Miami (Miami, FL), Intersect Fair (Aspen, CO), the Nemeth Art Center (Park Rapids, MN), I Love You Too (Portland, OR), TOA Presents (Cody, Wyoming), Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation (Ojai, CA), Rochester Art Center (Rochester, MN), Saint Kate’s Arts Hotel (Milwaukee, WI), New American Paintings, MN Artists. Residencies: The Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY (2021, 2022); Anderson Center Jerome Emerging Artist Residency and Fellowship, Red Wing, MN (2022); Nido invitational residency and exhibition, Monte Castello di Vibio, Umbria, Italy (2022); Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, CO (2022); Roswell Artist-in-Residence (alternate), Roswell, NM (2024-2025.)
*In Minneapolis:
HAIR+NAILS is pleased to present CHRIS LARSON Sculpture 2025-2026, a solo show by Twin Cities-based artist Chris Larson, opening Thursday, February 26, 2026, at HAIR+NAILS Minneapolis. This is the artist’s first solo show with HAIR+NAILS. Larson’s iconic video work “Heavy Rotation” anchored the group show “ROTATE” at HAIR+NAILS’ NYC gallery this past fall.
OPEN GALLERY HOURS: walk-ins welcome: Thursdays/Fridays/Saturdays/Sundays 1:00-5:00 starting February 27 through April 26, 2026. Also, appointments can be scheduled via hairandnailsart@gmail.com.
Chris Larson is a multimedia artist who lives and works in Saint Paul, Minnesota and is represented by ENGAGE Projects in Chicago, IL. He earned his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Sculpture from Yale University in 1991. Over the course of his career, Larson has received numerous prestigious awards, including the New Work Project Grant from The Harpo Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, a Bush Artist Fellowship, the McKnight Artist Fellowship, and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a Professor of Art at the University of Minnesota. Larson’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at prominent institutions such as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN; the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY; and The View Contemporary Art Space in Switzerland. His art has also been presented at major biennials, including the 2nd Biennial del Fin del Mundo in Ushuaia, Argentina; the 4th Bienal de Montevideo in Montevideo, Uruguay; the 2014 Whitney Biennial in New York City; and the 11th Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil. exhibition, Chris Larson: Function is Redundant, at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, OH. In 2018, Larson presented a comprehensive 10 year survey In addition to his gallery and museum exhibitions, Larson’s film work has garnered international recognition, with screenings at several film festivals, including the World Premiere of Stillness of Labor at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), the Tabor International Film Festival in Croatia, the DTLA Film Festival in Los Angeles, CA, and the Mediterranean Film Festival Cannes-Milan-Athens, among others. Larson’s work is represented in the permanent collections of several prestigious institutions, including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, and the Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, among others. In 2019, he co-founded Second Shift Studio Space in St. Paul, MN, a nonprofit residency program and gallery dedicated to serving artists/makers/thinkers whose gender identity has historically marginalized them.
http://www.chrislarsonstudio.com
