9 February - 22 March
CHRIS BALLANTYNE
When the World Was Flat
A curious emptiness permeates the work of Chris Ballantyne.
Banal features of suburban and industrial zones are sources
for paintings that highlight the quirky and absurd.
Graphically-rendered buildings, pools, parking lots, and
fences take on new meanings and amplified significance,
isolated on flat fields of color.

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. With shrewd restraint,
Ballantyne accentuates the antisocial effects of our built
environment with a hint of humor and plenty of ambiguity.

Chris Ballantyne received his MFA from the San Francisco Art
Institute and resides in Brooklyn. He was included in the
2006 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of
Art, and Bay Area Now at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,
San Francisco in 2005. His work is in the collections of the
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Museum
of Modern Art, New York.
 

JOHN O’REILLY
Portraits
For the past 40 years, Boston area artist John O’Reilly has
constructed complex and intimate photographic “montages.”
Using a Polaroid camera, he re-photographs images from art
history, found photographic albums and gay pornography.
He cuts and pastes them with Polaroids he takes of himself,
his home and his studio -- collaging history, art and fantasy.

This exhibition consists of eight montages, each a portrayal
of a character from literature. Themes that O’Reilly has
explored over and over again - beauty, age, ecstasy, death,
love, art, artifice – are layered into psychological portraits of
characters from Henry James, Thomas Mann and the Iliad.

This is O’Reilly’s sixth solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery.

 
XXXXX

Untitled, Lot (Bus Stop), 2007
 
 
 

 
Hector (from the Heroes series), 2006