With a deft hand and a quirky sense of humor, Brooklyn-based artist Chris Ballantyne highlights the desolate emptiness of American landscapes. In his paintings and murals, graphically rendered structures are isolated on flat fields of color, underscoring the anti-social effects of our built environment.
“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," says the artist. "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 individual sense of personal space, consciously economic, and somewhere between urban and rural.â€