Who we truly are
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:
A tattooed hand holds a fallen butterfly. The gesture is steady, deliberate—not tender, not cruel. It is the posture of attention.
Across different times, we have been named as sin, as disease, as debauchery, as unnatural. Those names carried consequences. Lives were shortened, erased, left unattended. What rests in the hand is not an emblem, but the remainder of that history.
The hand belongs to the present. It carries survival alongside knowledge and cannot pretend they are separate. To hold what has fallen is to remain close—to refuse distance from what has been lost.
"Who we truly are" is shaped not by the names once given to us, but by how we stay with their weight: quietly, carefully, and without turning away.
- Ian Stone, 2025
