October 30 – December 13, 2014
Opening reception brunch: Saturday November 1, from 10am-3pm
Performance: Dylan Stone Making Shirts at the gallery, from 10am-6pm
The gallery is pleased to present Dylan Stone’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition is based on his monumental watercolor, Barbara and David Stone’s Videos, LPs and Books, a portrait of his parents through their collection. Stone reexamines intimacy and relationships through their objects and redraws his parents’ handwriting on VHS videotapes. The artist explores systems, both categorical and relational, retelling and retracing his personal history alongside his family history.
Barbara and David Stone’s Videos, LPs and Books is a watercolor painting of a bookcase lined with familiar artifacts from the 1970s through the 1990s. Stone’s father, David, who recently passed away, worked in collaboration with his wife Barbara, producing films by filmmakers such as Jonas Mekas, Jerome Hill, and Robert Kramer. For thirty years they made home recordings of movies from television that tower over the gallery alongside oversized books and tchotchkes. The painting is tiled together in a mosaic, made of twenty-three sheets, with disjointed and skewed painted panes. Like the breaks and blips natural to older media, there is a dissonance to this un-straight forward tender representation of his parents’ history.
Twelve archive boxes that house My Father’s Newspaper Clippings on Art & Artists are filled with hundreds of editorials, articles, and reviews of exhibitions and books, obituaries and interviews that have been collected and filed alphabetically. This was a father's way to understand his son's world and to devour as much as he could about art. From 1989 until 2011 David sent him newspaper clippings from the International Herald Tribune, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and Time Out London. These clippings also had handwritten messages, 'Let's go see this show when you come back for Christmas', or 'Would you like this book for your birthday?', or 'Do you like this artist?'. From the time Dylan started art school he received these newspaper clippings by post, and serve as a recorded document until his father's passing twenty two years later.
A-B Box, a series of twelve watercolors that focus on the file folders that contain the newspaper clippings. The enclosed articles are listed in the artist’s handwriting. Stone has familiarity with systems of cataloging as in his 26,000 photographs of Lower Manhattan acquired by The New York Public Library and his previous monumental and detailed painting documenting his parents’ bookshelves now in the collection of The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. These file folders, painted in watercolor are a record and index of art and art history.
The performance Dylan Stone Making Shirts will be held during the opening reception. The artist sits at a table making shirts, as he did when he was seventeen. Piece by piece in the midst of his parents’ immense collection of almost expired media, Stone makes five shirts simultaneously as a self-contained assembly line, the completed shirts appearing at the end of the performance.
Born in New York City in 1967, Dylan Stone was raised in London where he lives and works. Select exhibitions include 100 Years of Personal Pocket Diaries, Ruth Phaneuf Fine Arts, New York, NY (2012), 35,000 Years Ago, Eina School of Art and Design, Espai Barra de Ferro, Barcelona (2009), Barbara and David Stone’s Bookshelf, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York, NY (2006), Boxed ‘n’ Cased, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, UK (2005), Greater New York, P.S.1, MoMA, New York, NY (2002), Photo Opportunities, New Jersey Center for the Arts, Summit, NJ (1999). His work is included in public collections including The New York Public Library, Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation Carnegie Mellon University, and The Museum of Fine Arts Houston.