K-HOUSE Karaoke & Arts Hub: Room K
Located at 121 W State St, Ithaca, NY 14850 Room K is located in the downstairs space of K-House, enter from the doors on State Street and walk down the staircase on the left.
Artist info at https://www.jenna-petrone.com/about
Hala & Jenna Petrone: Bayt Byoot
Bayt Byoot is a collaborative visual experiment between Hala and Jenna — life partners, artists, and creative collaborators. Hala is an illustrator and design activist, born and raised in Lebanon. Jenna is an artist and aspiring educator, originally from the Catskill Mountains in New York. Their narratives began to intertwine upon meeting in Brooklyn in 2019, both New York City transplants finding their footing as queer artists in a city of eight million. As their relationship evolved, they discovered that their upbringings shared many similarities — even though they took place six thousand miles apart. They traded stories of high school anxieties, small-town childhoods, father-figures who shaped their educations, and finding refuge in their creative practices. They found a home within each other's company, which eventually led them to buying a house in upstate New York, and a life they describe as two adults playing house, Bayt Byoot in Arabic.
During the summer of 2023, they visited Lebanon together for the first time. Jenna moved through it as an observer, translating her admiration for light, architecture, and the natural world into the digital images she brought home as souvenirs. Hala drew from years of accumulated memory and intimacy, her own stories and those of her friends and family, shaping them into new narratives told through place. Collaging became the natural language for this body of work, a form that asks two things to exist in the same space without one consuming the other. The resulting works are neither purely photographic nor purely drawn — they are a third thing, a visual vocabulary that belongs only to the two of them together. Together, they are learning a shared language from different lived experiences, and making room for each other within it as a chosen family.
