Whispering from deaths
doorstep
By Christopher Hume
This is the show Doug Stone
almost never gave. When he began working
on it last spring, the 36-year-old Toronto artist had just come out of a coma
and things didn’t look good.
“They didn’t think I’d
live,” says Stone. “When I came out of
the coma I started making lists and writing notes to people; I had so many
tubes in me I couldn’t talk to them.”
Not surprisingly, the
drawings on display at the Christopher Cutts Gallery (21 Morrow Ave.) are
intimate and highly autobiographical.
They form a kind of diary of illness, recovery and of life carrying on.
Stone, who has AIDS, did not
set out specifically to address the issue of his disease: This is not a series
about AIDS. Yet inevitably the works
contain references that are unmistakable- to AZT, for instance, and more
generically, to syringes, hospitals and the like.
Mostly, though, the show
documents the isolation that results from sickness. And more than isolation, Stones stuff
illustrates the introversion of the deathly ill. All these mundane instances of
life and its petty demands are at once depressing yet exhilarating. Something as ordinary as a grocery list
suddenly acquires enormous symbolic power.
But if these works are
drawings, they’re also collages. The
artist has assembled sheets of notepaper and sketches; he has written, drawn
and doodles across their surfaces. Only
on occasion do Stones pieces rise to the level of the finished artworks. For the most part, they are rough and
unfinished, as befits and autobiography that’s still in progress.
Everything here gives the
impression of having been done quickly, but not urgently. There’s more acceptance that panic, more calm
than fear.
As much as anything, the
quickness of the work is about Stone’s need to focus on art making. In this way, he can clear his mind and
transcend the circumstances of sickness.
To his credit, Stone has
avoided any trace of sentimentality and the urge to self-pity. He has become an observer to his own
existence, a spectator to the life and death struggle he wages daily.
For instance, many pieces in
the show include hand-written text, much of it devoted to work-play unrelated
to anything beyond the pleasure it affords.
“Conspiracy… privacy…. ray…democracy…demonstration…demons ration….”
In addition, there are
visual elements that recur regularly, especially a crudely rendered cross. It has been a feature of Stone’s work for
several years despite the huge changes it has undergone since he arrived on the
scene in the early ‘80s.
Back then, Stone was a
designer. One of his creations was a
table - for urban nomads - supported on legs made of steel poles and pop
bottles filled with sand. It was a nice
comment on an increasingly transient society.
If that work looked ahead,
this looks backward. The raw material in
his life and career, on which he gazes with detached curiosity. Ironically but fortunately, from this
material Stone has fashioned a new approach to making art. Where is will lead no one knows, but already
it has provided a glimpse of a future that didn’t exist as recently as last
spring.
“this has become a new
direction,” he says. “In the last few
years I’ve produced mostly paintings.”
The work in his last show
looked like so many black boards after a hard day in the classroom. Now, Stone has introduced color, albeit to a
very limited degree.
Stone’s is as quiet as an
exhibition comes. It doesn’t scream for
attention- as do William Fisk’s cartoon paintings next door- but attempts to
engage the viewer in a very intimate manner.
This is a show that whispers, but eloquently.
Corinna Ghaznavi
Funny furniture
Christopher Hume
Toronto Star, Thursday,
January 19, 1984
We are nomads says Toronto
artist-designer Doug Stone. His answer:
nomadic furniture.
Stone’s Coke Bottle Table, for example, is almost completely
disposable. It consists of six bottles
filled with sand. A rod is placed in
each to act as legs for a glass tabletop.
When you move, all you have to do is empty the bottles, return then to
the store and pack the rods and glass.
The piece is among the best
on display at the Tatay Gallery’s (101 Niagara St.) furniture show. Organized
by gallery curator Leo Kamen, the exhibition is interesting but couldn’t have
been timed worse. As (bad) luck would have it, his show comes just three months
after Chromaliving, the collections of furniture and clothing by artists.
The Tatay show is smaller and
more retrained than Chromaliving. The
latter featured 150 artists, for former 15.
Kamed also points out his “is not an environmental exhibition.” Instead,
it’s a gallery filled with furniture.
Where Chromaliving seduced, Kamen titillates.
Regardless, the show – call
it Chromaclone – drew a huge Tuesday opening night crowd of more than 600. Despite its modest scale, the show has much
to recommend it. In addition to Stone’s
pieces, the most notable items are Michael Robertson’s Neo-Constructivist Mobile recliner, Max Leser’s table of glass and
stainless steel, Doug Morrison’s spiked screen and Katherine Zsolt’s Dragon Lamp.
Technically, the most
competent participant is Robertson, a veteran of Chromaliving. His designs are elegant, witty yet
functional. From his “asymmetrical
clocks” to the recliner, Robertson’s work meets the demands of art and
furniture.
Despite the odd flicker, the
flame sparked by Chromaliving still burns.
Curious collection at Tatay Gallery
Christopher Hume
Toronto Star, Friday, June 29, 1984
This week in galleryland I stumbled upon a curious
collection of contemporary art clutter at the Tatay Gallery (101 Niagara St.).
Titles Conjunctions:
The Art Of Joining (no, they’re not erotic drawings), the show includes
Brent McDougall’s wood sculptures, multi-media collages by Douglas Stone and
Roger Wood’s boxed assemblages.
McDougall, better known for his masks and costumes, has
finally achieved something worthwhile in these strong yet simple
sculptures. Working with “found” objects;
he cuts, paints and joins them to form vaguely anthropomorphic
constructions. They look a little like
inukshuks, the stone piles the Inuit build to resemble men. Perhaps because they’re so weatherbeaten they
also possess an unexpected dignity.
Stone, the most intellectual of the trio, seems happiest
mixing media. Part designer, part
artist, Stone’s greatest asset is his flexibility. His Nailed
Paper series contains thumbtacks, string, waxpaper and other things he
calls “transitory objects.” Again, the
idea was to join them in new and novel ways.
White Water Gallery
hosting Stone exhibit
By Gilbert McElroy
North Bay Nugget, March, 1986
Works of
two-dimensional art, such as drawings, paintings and prints, grouped together
into the form of an exhibition should, ideally create a three and even four
dimensional experience for the viewer.
This extension of
dimensions is, however, entirely dependent on the viewers ability or
willingness to perceive, and even create, interconnectedness and context.
The exhibition of
drawings by Toronto artist Doug Stone currently showing at the White Water
Gallery affords an excellent opportunity to see two dimensional art works
transcend their singularity and in plurality create a three and four
dimensional viewing experience.
The exhibition
consists of a wall length drawing completed specifically for, and at, the White
Water Gallery, and a series of individual drawings Stone made prior to the
exhibition.
The wall length
drawing was created on site as reaction to a variety of contexts: music Stone
heard while working on the drawing over the course of several days, the simple
fact of his being in north Nay and the presence of the previous completed
drawings hung along the opposite wall of the gallery.
Spend enough time
with the work and the gallery begins to fill with an invisible network of
associations criss-crossing the gallery space. Repetition of various image,
shapes and forms creates visual ricochets linking the onsite drawing with the
previously completed works, and gives the exhibition, as a totality, a
dimensionality that transcends any of the individual pieces.
This occurs as well
more obviously within the two-dimensional plane of the drawings
themselves. In the illusory dimension of
perspective, triangles organize into pyramidal structures, and circles and flat
grids evolve into spheres and cubes.
Reinforcement of
the illusion comes from Stones use of colors, vibrant planes of which function
almost antagonistically in their relationship to the mathematics of Stones
images.
But there is no
antagonism between the illusory dimension of perspective in Stones drawings,
and the true dimension created by drawings interacting with one another. In the microcosm that is an exhibition there
is only mutual dependence.
Stone Works
Grappling with the vicissitudes of life provides inspiration
and a mine of material for artist Douglas Stone.
A large black canvas leans against the wall of the
Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto’s industrial west end. On it are wraith-like shapes of a naked man,
and words- “apes + doll fins,” “sexual deviation”- scrawled loosely as if by a
vandal, one with a very thin piece of chalk and a very weak hand. The big black canvas was featured in artist
Douglas Stone’s last show at Cutts gallery, and Cutts must have been pleased:
He’s hosting another Stone show in December. Stone is an artist whose tasteful
drawings, collages and paintings manage to combine words and marks, autobiographical
references, and a kind of graceful insouciance.
But if Apes + Doll Fins shows
any playfulness, it’s that of someone dancing on a grave. Stone looks over his funereal-coloured canvas
and acknowledges calmly, “That was probably my darkest time. Yeah, last year.”
Stone is
not, at first, someone you associate with dark pronouncements. A cocky, boyish 45-year-old, he has been a
longtime fixture on the Queen Street scene, a friend of the General Idea
collective, and a one –time tenant of Queen Street’s founding mother, Sandy
Stagg.
In the late
seventies he ran a high-tech furniture store on Queen Street East. In the eighties, Stone was famous for
innovative furniture design (one of his wittier creations involved six
sand-filled Coca-Cola bottles, each holding a rod which in turn supported a
glass table top).
In short,
Stone is Peter Pan- or as a friend, Michael Jay, wrote in New York Native, a gay community newspaper, “Douggie is the closest
thing I’ve ever met to that almost tragic blend of naivete and calculation that
is Holly Golightly.
Like
Golightly, the wistful madcap in Breakfast
at Tiffany’s, Stone combines street smarts, wide-eyed friendliness and
vulnerability. And like Golightly he
lives in a bohemian loft-studio with exxentric furniture. But whereas Golightly had a bathtub for a
sofa, Stone has furnished his studio with handsome industrial castoffs. His bed consists of two slabs of
syrup-coloured wood, which were formerly the double doors of a corperate
boardroom. At 250 pounds each, these
monumental slabs seem to float above the floor, thanks to the ingenious way
Stone has suspended them almost invisibly from the ceiling by aircraft
cable. When he needs more space for
parties, he kicks the coffee table, which turns out to be an old industrial
dolly. It scoots across the floor to
slide under the suspended bed like a chastised puppy dog.
But Stone
cant have had too many parties in the last year. His father, a butcher in the small, Ontario
town of Waterford, died at age 44, so Stone’s own 44th year looked
portentous before it began. The day
after his birthday in 1995 he broke out in a hideous full-body rash, a rare
allergic reaction to the drugs he was taking for his HIV-positive condidtion. Five months later, he was finally well enough
to drive to Calgary for his one-man show at the NewZones Gallery, and then on
to the coast. But in Vancouver his car
was stolen. He recovered the car and
drove on to Arizona where he collapsed with pneumonia, ditched the car (it’s
still there) and flew home-to head straight to the hospital.
Stone
nearly died. “When I was in the
hospital, coming out of the coma, I still had the breathing tubes in me. I couldn’t talk… so I wrote down my one-sided
conversations. Here they are.” He pushes
some rumpled white sheets across the kitchen counter. “I’m trying to incorporate these into the new
work,” he explains. “She is a nurse so
you can be blunt” reads one scrawl.
Another reads: “WAKEING UP FFFRRM”- and then a space- “BAD SLEEP”.
Like some
self-conscious magpie, Stone saves everything- scraps of paper with phone
numbers, mathematical calculations, diagrams for the design of his bed, notes
on words relevant to his life with HIV (one drawing collage in the Cutts
Gallery incorporates jottings on the word “immunity”). Gallery owner Christopher Cutts observes,
“These works are pieces of Doug’s life.”
Once that
was a life of play; now, although his doctors assure him that his recovery is
miraculous, he is still shadowed by his face-to-face confrontation with
mortality. Father Daniel Donovan, who
has collected Stone’s work, maintains that it was a deeply spiritual quality:
“My appreciation for Doug’s work is for the serious side- the artist struggling
with the profound human experience and the challenge of hope and death. On one level he is inventive, spontaneous,
expressive.” The work that speaks to Donovan most directly? Death Full of Possibilities.
Stone smiles wistfully at the
thought that people find his work serious.
“I do have a light side,” he insists and sings all the words to the Mr. Ed tv show theme to prove it. Then something jogs his memory: “You know,
people say they go through a tunnel and then they die? I did that.
I went through the tunnel. It was
nice over there,” he adds softly. “It
was really sunny.”
Flash art
Vol. XXXI n. 202
October 1998
Multiple facets make up experience: fragments, memory, and daily events like
rearranging one’s studio or balancing a budget.
Building up layers or the ubiquitous in juxtaposition with affirmative
paint/marker strokes which burst forth across the page speaking of potency,
passion, and life, Doug Stone demonstrates the significance in the sum of all
parts making up a life.
Stone’s sculptural training and
interest in architecture become visible in the tight construction of layered
surfaces which, though formally labeled collage, push beyond this
description. Made up of disparate and
often skewed pieces – drawings and notes, cheques and bank statements
interlayered with paint, marker, shellac, and scribbles in pen – the
composition retains an astounding balance and aesthetic.
The explosive forms dominating this recent
body of work are budding, scorched, and fertile flowers executed in rapid black
marker strokes and oil bar. With time
these black surfaces become sepiant. The
flowers appear burnt or take on a tangible velvety depth. They evolve into tornados, female genital, or
the explosion of sperm, capturing an essential theme of Stone’s work: to
function as signifiers for several tings simultaneously while incorporating,
through the chemical change which takes place over time, the process of both
experience and the evolution of the piece itself.
The figure
of a painter on a cheque stub indicates the tradition in which Stone sees
himself, while the piece itself demonstrates the radicality of this position. Staples are used formally as measured lines
and conceptually as stitches. This
aspect of sewing and the insinuation of sperm and female genitalia in a single
image blur traditional gender roles. A
powerful gestural form painted over a precise architectural drawing
superimposes chaos on order. Moving
between detail and the whole, we negotiate meaning-making until we arrive at a
point of convergence, experiencing both contingency and temporal completion.
Artpost april/may 1987
In Douglas Stone’s giant drawings on white paper tacked to
the wall, we find lots of lines doing their thing, colors surfacing at random,
a coming and going of shaped and a reveling in total chaos, except that a
definite border surrounds the entire work.
There is a beautiful range of movement and line quality, from long and
straight to choppy, to a line drawn, it seems, with a piece of rope. The aggressive laying down of lines is
tempered by the openness of the white space and the frolicsomeness of the
content. It is altogether playful and
confusing, like magic.
