Safe space
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 description:
Two tattooed hands lift a shallow bowl; its surface densely patterned with butterflies. The vessel is not empty, but already filled - with image, labor, and accumulated care. What is being held is not safety as shelter, but as continuation.
The butterflies appear here as ornament rather than remains. Repeated across the surface, they speak to persistence: how queer creativity has survived by embedding itself in objects, making, decoration, and shared forms of beauty. The bowl becomes a record of this endurance, carrying what has been shaped, exchanged, and preserved over time. The hands hold the vessel steady, marked by lived experience and contemporary presence. Together they suggest the ongoing act of transmission - how culture is passed not through institutions, but through touch, craft, and intimacy.
"Safe Space" points to survival not as retreat, but as longevity: the quiet, generative fact of having lasted, and of continuing to make.
-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.