KATY STONE
FORCE FIELD
Spreading across the wall, spilling onto the floor, or cascading from architectural supports, Katy Stone’s artworks are like Rorschach tests of natural phenomena. She paints on a variety of materials and layers the elements into sculptural assemblages and installations that blur the boundaries between drawing, painting, and sculpture and act as both kaleidoscope and microscope.
Katy Stone’s exhibition Force Field is an exploration of the powerful emotional narrative conveyed through grounding the viewer in the here and now, while at the same time exuding the feeling of other realms, far vistas, and futuristic nostalgia. The title of the show expresses these relationships—the recurring forms/forces of nature, its relationship to landscape, and its mysticism.
Her current body of work has been developed to create psychic and physical space for contemplation. Everything is atmospheric, relating to the sky and vapors, suggesting distant landscapes and energetic bodies: clouds, mists, waterfalls, terrains, celestial forms, rays of light. Look. Feel the pull. The colors are glowing, like sunset and sunrise, the surfaces shimmer. Alluding to phenomena that are unique in the moment yet eternally recurring, Stone’s pieces resonate with the sense of time—and faraway places in the past or future. Katy’s expressive artworks are installed for an exhibition at J. Rinehart Gallery.
In conjunction with the exhibition, an exhibition catalog will be published with an essay written by independent scholar, writer and art advocate, Sharon Arnold.
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These works create psychic and physical space for contemplation. Everything is atmospheric, relating to the sky and vapors, suggesting distant landscapes and energetic bodies: clouds, mists, waterfalls, terrains, celestial forms, rays of light. Look. Feel the pull. The colors are glowing, like sunset and sunrise, the surfaces shimmer. Alluding to phenomena that are unique in the moment yet eternally recurring, my pieces resonate with the sense of time—and faraway places in the past or future.
My work explores materiality, phenomena and beauty. I use industrial materials that are light, that call attention to themselves as surfaces. Everything I choose is a thin thing. I paint, cut, and layer these surfaces into constructions that blur the boundaries between drawing, painting, and sculpture. Brimming with dualities, my pieces capture a sense of monumentality and at the same time a feeling of transience. Organic/synthetic, micro/macro, real/imaginary, moving/still—these opposites coalesce into an expansive wholeness. Everything is itself and something else. Clouds, trees, branches, falls, rays, my recurring natural forms grow, pile-up and spill over, allusions of elemental power and symbols of transformation, of liberation.
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Stone received her BFA in Drawing, Painting and Printmaking from Iowa State University, and her MFA in Painting from the University of Washington.
She has exhibited at Boise Art Museum; Boston University Art Gallery; Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle; Kansas City Art Institute; Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art; Mass Art, Boston; McNay Museum of Art, San Antonio; Missoula Art Museum; Schneider Museum, Ashland; Sun Valley Center, Ketchum; University of Akron; University of Richmond; Washington State Convention Center; and Watcom Museum of Art. Her commissioned public artworks include projects for the GSA's Art in Architecture Program, Washington State Arts Commission, The City of Seattle, Cleveland Clinic, Michigan State University, and corporate clients including ConocoPhillips and Microsoft. She lives and works in Seattle.