JULIUS CAESAR Pop-Up as part of BARELY FAIR 2024 @ Color Club*
@Color Club, 4146 N Elston Ave
Open Saturday, April 27, 1-4PM
Closes May 4th, 1-4PM
Color Club's 100-year-old home is not yet wheelchair accessible. For more information on the venue, visit them here.
See-Through Place
Christina Ballantyne @ Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar is pleased to present a solo exhibition of CHRISTINA BALLANTYNE ( b. 1990, Houston, TX). A Los Angeles-based artist, Ballantyne's work blends the lines between painting and sculpture. "My paintings begin with the outline of a face or shape that is cut, filled, and stitched onto the canvas to create a dimensional, almost sculptural effect," says Ballantyne. Her paintings are paired with small wooden figurative sculptures on which she paints bright colors.
Her stretched canvases with sewn-on forms become containers for psychological and spiritual forces imposing on our day-to-day lives. The push and pull of these forces are depicted literally with bulging surfaces. On the rolling forms of her canvases, she paints figures wandering the astral plane. Her figures set in landscapes of the mind, they often appear caught in the winds of emotional disturbances or spiritual traumas. The canvases protruding at viewers, the effects she paints become physically imposing on her audience.
Carved wooden sculptures accompany her paintings, often tucked away in corners or high on walls. At once witnesses to and adorning the space, her roughly-hewn and painted heads feature faces on multiple planes, reminiscient of Janus-like fetishes. The chiseled forms of figurine evoking associations to talisman and other ancient objects used to navigate a psychologically fraught landscapes, protection against spiritual danger.
Ballantyne's exhibition "See-Through Place" contains both struggle and the antidote. Her paintings embody an imposing-yet-familiar feeling of psychological distress in sensational color and effect, tender craft and touch. Her sculptures roughly chiseled and formed, are immediately recognizable as sympathetic objects of protection. The polarities contained by each work and their combination captures the schisms quintessential to contemporary life. We are delighted to share her work, both for its prescient capturing of an all-too familiar plight, and its presence as a salve to our spiritual crisis.
CHRISTINA BALLANTYNE ( b. 1990, Houston, TX) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in painting and sculpture. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021 where she was recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler award. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Hair & Nails (Minneapolis, MN), Sulk (Chicago, IL), and Martha’s Contemporary (Austin, TX). Group exhibitions include Felix Art Fair (Los Angeles), Make Room LA (Los Angeles, CA), Andrew Raefacz (Chicago, IL), and Research House for Asian Art (Chicago, IL).
