Ian Stone | A Seat at the Table
Ian Stone | A Seat at the Table
Inaugural Solo Vancouver Exhibition
February 7-21, 2026
Upper Gallery
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 7, 2-4pm
Bau-Xi Vancouver proudly presents A Seat at the Table, the inaugural solo exhibition in Vancouver by Canadian high realist painter and Bau-Xi Gallery's newest artist roster addition Ian Stone.
Stone is a Montreal-based painter whose work explores still life and figuration through the lenses of queer memory, camp, and the aesthetics of collection. Drawing from personal and inherited objects - ornamental, kitsch, and decorative - Stone treats painting as a site of archival reimagining, where objects stand in for histories shaped by desire, longing, and exclusion. His practice is deeply informed by art history, often referencing historical examples and visual strategies, which he reinterprets to speak to contemporary queer experience.
Artist statement:
In A Seat at the Table, I use the language of still life to reconstruct historical spaces - domestic, feminine, and contemplative places where queerness might have quietly persisted. These arrangements of vessels, flowers, butterflies, and flames are not mere objects; they are sites of memory and silence, of what endures and what disappears.
A 16th-century Spanish friar once wrote, “Sodomites are like butterflies, drawn to their own burning.” That image, intended as condemnation, becomes in my work an act of remembrance. The butterflies stand for those who were burned: men whose desire marked them for destruction and whose tenderness was turned against them. Fire, in turn, held a sacred role in early modern thought - it was seen as the purest symbol of divine masculinity. In burning queer bodies, that “divine” fire became a tool of correction, as if to reclaim a masculinity imagined as lost.
In reclaiming the flame, I seek to reverse that violence. The fire in these paintings no longer purifies or condemns - it reveals and transforms. These works exist within the tension between the violence of a world that punishes difference and the passionate self-knowledge that comes from surviving it. Each still life is a meditation on what queerness has brought to the table of history, to our legacy, and our sense of belonging. An insistence that fragility is not weakness.
I draw on archival fragments: trial records that punished effeminacy, poems that celebrated forbidden love, words once spoken only in whispers, and the geographies of persecution themselves. Visiting these sites revealed how memory clings to the ground - how violence leaves its own kind of archive.
A Seat at the Table is not a plea for inclusion, but an assertion of authorship. The work suggests that queerness persists not only in what is preserved, but also in what has been censored, damaged, or half-forgotten. These still lifes are offerings to that persistence - an attempt to hold beauty and loss in the same frame. It asks what happens when those once burned return to the table, carrying with them both the light that tried to destroy them, and the radiance that survived it.
-Ian Stone, 2025
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