Chris Sallquist is a mixed media portrait artist who breaks apart familiar faces to expose what we rarely see.

Working by hand with an iPhone and physical manipulation, he crumples, folds, and layers textures and fragments to push each portrait beyond recognition. Rejecting AI entirely, Sallquist draws on the wabi-sabi principle that incompleteness is more honest than polish, guided by what isn't immediately visible: the raw, unresolved interior of a subject.

A former design-firm partner, Sallquist left a conventional creative career after encountering Christian Marclay's Video Quartet at the Seattle Art Museum in 2004. He went on to write a novel, produce podcasts, and perform live comedy before finding his stride in mixed media photography about 15 years ago, a practice that keeps evolving as confrontational, dimensional, and distinctly his own.