The parts I let you see
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:
Curtains have appeared in my paintings for years as a way of thinking about the closet: what we conceal, what we reveal, and the performance involved in deciding which parts of ourselves are safe to show. Coming out is often imagined as the moment when that curtain is finally pulled aside, but coming out doesn't necessarily abolish the habits created by the closet. The closet can survive as a behaviour rather than a location.
You can be openly gay and still have spent years learning how much of yourself to reveal in a room: how feminine to be, how you move, what you wear, how you speak, what you admit to loving, and even the objects you choose to surround yourself with. Those negotiations can become so ingrained that concealment no longer requires an actual closet. We continue to construct ourselves through decisions about what is shown and what remains protected.
In this painting, the curtain no longer physically hides anything. It occupies most of the image, while a small arrangement of flowers sits openly beside it. The flowers become significant precisely because they are so modest: someone chose them, arranged them, placed them in a delicate glass vessel and made a space for their beauty. That small act of aesthetic attention connects to my larger interest in gay male visual culture, collecting, domesticity and femininity—ways of expressing and constructing identity that can exist without ever explicitly naming it.
The imbalance between the two became important to me. The structure of concealment is enormous, while what has been revealed is small. Yet the flowers hold their ground. The painting asks whether coming out means we have stopped hiding, or whether we simply become more practiced at deciding which parts of ourselves to place in view.
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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.