LOOK NEAR INTO THE DISTANCE
Art Palace Gallery, Houston, TXSeptember 6-October 26, 2013
The arc of Stone’s work bridges the intersection between truth and fiction, reality and fantasy, and the natural and artificial. Stone’s photographs and paintings are world-making exercises, in which traditional notions of picture making are embraced and subverted. The landscapes and objects depicted in Stone’s works form perceptual mirages made possible through manipulations of scale, color, code, and paint. Simultaneously enormous and impossibly small, an improbably blue cave sits next to a distant, tiny super moon and a chandelier hovers in front of a cloudy, black tromp l’oeil sky. Stone also manipulates the code of digital images, updating the storied traditions of still-life and landscape to create colorful and elegant glitched bouquets and sunsets. The show’s title is a summation and inversion of utopian thinker Ernst Bloch’s sentiment that utopians create their idealized visions of the future through close scrutiny of the world near at hand. World making, thus, is equal parts critical inquiry and hopeful future casting.