Memory, desire, survival
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 hand opens to reveal a butterfly resting in the palm. The gesture is gentle, deliberate, familiar. The body remembers how to hold what is fragile.
The butterfly carries memory: lives encountered, lost, brushed against and carried forward. It carries desire - not as spectacle, but as something intimate and persistent, shaped by risk and longing. What remains in the hand is not transformation, but continuity. Survival appears here not as triumph, but as practice. It lives in attention, in care, in the act of holding without ownership or force. The hand does not claim the butterfly; it keeps it for a moment.
Memory, desire, survival are not separate states. They coexist - quietly - in the body, in what is remembered, in what is still wanted, and in what continues, even when it must be carried gently and let go.
-Ian Stone, 2025
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Born in Montreal (1982), Stone studied printmaking at NSCAD University before completing an MFA in painting and drawing at Concordia University. His early training in printmaking continues to inform his approach to image construction, visible in the layered, deliberate process through which his compositions are staged, photographed, and translated into painting.
Stone has exhibited across Canada and internationally. His work is held in public and private collections, including the Florida State University Museum and the National Palace of Culture in Sofia, Bulgaria. Stone continues to develop a practice that bridges historical painting techniques with contemporary narratives.