To burn is not to vanish
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:
Fire burns on the table. Smoke rises, dense and unresolved. What is altered does not disappear—it changes form and persists. Burning has long been used as a language of erasure. Here it fails. Ash remains. Heat lingers. The air carries what cannot be undone.
The table grounds the scene, refusing transcendence. What burns does so within the ordinary, within the spaces where history occurred. The transformation is real, but it is not annihilation.
This fire does not belong entirely to the past. It speaks to a future in which destruction is not an accident, but a condition—produced, repeated, and reimagined. What endures must now learn to survive what has not yet finished burning.
- Ian Stone, 2025
