Ian Stone

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: 
This painting is built around a postcard reproduction of Saint Sebastian, surrounded by a collected arrangement of objects that gather around an image already burdened with centuries of meaning. Sebastian is not present simply as a gay icon. He becomes the point around which different forms of looking accumulate: religious looking, erotic looking, historical looking, mourning, fetishizing and identifying. The surrounding objects respond to his body in different ways. Some preserve it, some ornament it, some threaten it, some desire it.

I have become increasingly interested in how queer history survives through fragments—not as a continuous public record, but through images, coded objects, devotional pictures, decorative forms and private collections whose meanings have to be reconstructed later. The postcard is important for this reason. It is already an image that has travelled: an artwork reproduced, collected and carried into another time and another intimacy.

The objects surrounding it are not intended as symbols with fixed meanings. Their significance emerges through proximity and association. A cord, a charred branch, a feather, a flower, a razor blade and collected objects begin to affect one another simply by being placed together. Meaning happens in the space between them. The painting becomes a kind of imagined archive, assembled from things that may never have belonged together historically but can nevertheless make a history felt.

Collecting is central to this process. For me, collecting is a way of building a world when history doesn't hand you one. Still life becomes a place where fragments can be gathered, preserved and rearranged—where objects can stand in for histories that were never fully recorded. The painting does not recover an intact queer past. It asks what kind of history can be built from what remains.

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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.