Witness
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:
In this painting, fire is rendered as a still life—monumental, upright, and contained. During the Renaissance and early modern period, fire was understood as a symbol of divine masculinity, associated with authority, purification, and moral correction. Within this logic, burning was used to discipline queer bodies, framed as a way of restoring a masculinity believed to have been lost.
Fire is also impossible to ignore. It mesmerizes, commands attention, and resists looking away. By isolating the flame and removing the body, the work arrests that history and redirects the gaze.
Stripped of its purpose as punishment or purification, the fire assumes a different role. It no longer acts upon bodies but demands to be witnessed. Held within the still life, masculinity persists without function—exposed, unresolved, and held to account—asking what remains when authority can no longer perform its violence.
- Ian Stone, 2025