Look Near Into the Distance

BARRY STONE

Opening Reception: Friday, September 6, 2013, 6-8pm

Exhibition runs through October 26, 2013.

Art Palace is pleased to present Look Near Into the Distance, a solo exhibition by Austin-based artist Barry Stone. The arc of Stone’s work bridges the intersection between truth and fiction, reality and fantasy, and the natural and artificial. Stone’s photographs and paintings are world-making exercises, in which traditional notions of picture making are embraced and subverted. The landscapes and objects depicted in Stone’s works form perceptual mirages made possible through manipulations of scale, color, code, and paint. Simultaneously enormous and impossibly small, an improbably blue cave sits next to a distant, tiny super moon and a chandelier hovers in front of a cloudy,  black tromp l’oeil sky. Stone also manipulates the code of digital images, updating the storied traditions of still-life and landscape to create colorful and elegant glitched bouquets and sunsets. The show’s title is a summation and inversion of utopian thinker Ernst Bloch’s sentiment that utopians create their idealized visions of the future through close scrutiny of the world near at hand. World making, thus, is equal parts critical inquiry and hopeful future casting.

BARRY STONE
DARKSIDE OF THE RAINBOW

October 15 through November 12, 2011
Artist Reception – Saturday, October 15 6-8pm

Darkside of the Rainbow, Barry Stone’s first solo show at Art Palace, takes its title from the common practice of playing the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd’s Darkside of the Moon (1973) album synchronously. Just as the superimposition of film and album suggests new associations emerging from the juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous elements, so too do Stone’s groupings of photographs, drawings, collage and paintings.

Stone places a photograph of a rainbow that seems to project from a man’s head at the seaside alongside abstract paintings of imagined dark portals, abstractions from vintage heavy metal music magazines, and digital rainbows created from press photographs. Placed within a fluid architecture-characterized by repeating motifs, contradiction and fantasy-any image grouping may suggest multiple meanings. Stone’s work revels in and lays bare the constructions of our image fantasies; in these works fact and fantasy fold into one another to create hopeful visions and yet offer dire warnings.

Barry Stone has exhibited nationally, at venues including the School of the International Center of Photography, New York; The Contemporary Museum in Baltimore; Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York; Ok Ok Gallery, Seattle; Marcia Woods Gallery, Atlanta; Tiny Vice’s, New York, and Arthouse, Austin. His work has been covered in the New York Sun, Art lies, The Photography Post, and Artnet.