Between flame and smoke
Ian Stone's meticulously rendered still life and figurative paintings explore queer memory and camp through carefully arranged collections of ornamental and personal objects, with the body positioned as a site through which identity is formed, expressed, and remembered. Informed by traditions of 19th-century Realism and Western art history, his oil paintings and drawings are rich in detail and cultural awareness, reflecting how femininity, longing, and performance shape contemporary queer life. Paintings are unframed, while works on paper are framed under glass.
Artist's submission:
This painting centers on a small, contained fire resting on a table—neither spectacle nor catastrophe, but something held in suspension. The flames curl inward as much as they rise, while smoke gathers above them, folding back on itself and lingering in the air.
Here, fire is released from its historical role as punishment or purification. Instead, it becomes a generative force, held between ignition and disappearance. The title names this threshold: a space where transformation is neither complete nor undone, where something is allowed to form under pressure.
Smoke functions as memory and residue—the afterimage of violence that cannot be erased but can be reinhabited. Within the quiet discipline of the still life, Between Flame and Smoke suggests that queer survival often takes place in this in-between state: not always visible as resistance, but sustained through patience, endurance, and the refusal to go out.
- Ian Stone, 2025
