Ian Stone
CURRENT SOLO EXHIBITION: A Seat at the Table
February 7-26, 2026
Upper Gallery
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening reception: Saturday, February 7 from 2 - 4 pm
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Ian Stone is a Montreal-based painter whose work explores still life and figuration through the lenses of queer memory, camp, and the aesthetics of collection. Drawing from personal and inherited objects - ornamental, kitsch, and decorative - Stone treats painting as a site of archival reimagining, where objects stand in for histories shaped by desire, longing, and exclusion. His practice is deeply informed by art history, often referencing historical examples and visual strategies, which he reinterprets to speak to contemporary queer experience.
Stone’s paintings often depict carefully arranged groupings of objects rendered with meticulous realism - both in a photorealistic sense and in the broader tradition of 19th-century Realism, which sought to represent everyday life with accuracy, honesty, and attention to ordinary experience. Drawing on this lineage, Stone’s work also carries a social and cultural awareness, exploring how queer subjectivity and gender expression - particularly the presence of femininity in men - pervade and define gay experience, shaping desire, behavior, and the ways identity is performed and perceived.
Born in Montreal, Quebec, where he lives and works, Stone received a BFA in printmaking from NSCAD University in Halifax in 2004 and an MFA in painting and drawing from Concordia University in 2007. His work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the Florida State University Museum and the National Palace of Culture, Sofia, Bulgaria.
