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 description:
This painting presents the male body as a site where histories of masculinity have been shaped and enforced. The torso is rendered with clarity and strength, invoking an image of masculinity long sanctioned and affirmed. At the same time, it is framed by softness and historical ornament, recalling forms of power that once allowed beauty, texture, and vulnerability to coexist with authority.
At the upper edge of the composition, a cross earring appears. Decorative in form yet structural in meaning, it signals a system that shaped how masculinity was narrowed, femininity displaced, and binaries hardened. Within this framework, softness in men became untenable, while domestic and contemplative spaces were relegated to the feminine.
Held together in a single image, these forces are not reconciled but exposed. Masculinity appears here not as a natural given, but as something historically produced—formed through belief, ritual, and correction. The work reflects on what was lost when masculinity was stripped of tenderness, and what becomes visible when that loss is no longer hidden.
Revisiting these structures now is not incidental. In a moment marked by renewed calls for rigid gender roles, the romanticization of submission, and the erosion of reproductive and bodily autonomy, the painting insists that these hierarchies are neither neutral nor inevitable. By looking back, it asks what histories are being reactivated in the present—and what is at stake when masculinity is once again asked to harden, purify, and rule.
- Ian Stone, 2025
