BARRY STONE

HUM

HUM
SOFA, Austin, TX
March 5- April 9, 2011

Barry Stone’s exhibition of photographs and drawings, Hum, distorts sets of polarities:
feminine and masculine,the ballad and metal music, the drawn image and the mechanical image,
youth and adulthood. Often, the pictures are paired together to create tension or to complicate
meaning. An image is so rarely read alone.

For this exhibition, Stone culled photographs he made from various visits to his hometown of
Spring, Texas, including images of the block he grew up on and the house he lived in for most
of his youth. The tops of trees, a wrecked Camaro, a window reflected in the surface of a
framed Judy Chicago poster all became his subjects as he wandered through the spaces of his
adolescence. To create distance from his direct experience, Stone pairs these photographs
with drawn polygons or slightly skewed rectangles filled in with stipples and feathered wisps
of Sumi ink. Read together, the inked shapes create a more abstract reading of the photographs
of sites and things. It is an abstraction that recalls the tricky nature of memory, perception,
and the synthesis of identity and meaning.

S.E. Smith's Review of HUM.