Katy Stone

My new work pulses with the organic motion of waves, of wind, of topographies.  Built with amassed gestures, my pieces evoke both the aerial and the terrestrial – imagined terrains of the sky, the water, and the land.  These pieces represent moments of convergence, growing, reaching, and becoming, as they materialize the invisible energies in nature.  

Made from laser cut aluminum or acrylic, based on gestures developed through brushed ink or digital drawings, these works are amassed in thin layers, floating off the wall in shallow relief; the shadows cast on the wall from natural and directional light are an integral aspect of each piece.  The surfaces are tactile, ranging from matte to glossy, with vibrant color and metallic sheen.  Continuing to be influenced by early 20th Century Mysticism, these new works also relate to aspects of color field painting and the light and space movement.  Executed in a variety of scales, the pieces feel both micro and macro-cosmic, as they make physical space and psychic space for contemplation. 

Stone has exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Denver,  Vienna, and at museums including The McNay and the Boise Art Museum and alternative spaces including Suyama Space in Seattle. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions across the US including “Flow, Just Flow” at the Harnett Museum of Art in Richmond, VA, “Art + Space” at Project4 in Washington, DC, “Other Worlds,” at the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, FL; “Earthly Delights,” at Mass Art in Boston; and internationally at The Chengdou International Biennale in Chengdou, South Korea. She has been reviewed in many publications including Artweek, New Art Examiner, Sculpture Magazine and Art in America. Katy has been exhibiting with Johansson Projects since 2006. 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.

Stone received her BFA in Drawing, Painting and Printmaking from Iowa State University, and her MFA in Painting from the University of Washington. She lives and works in Seattle.

CV

The Seattle Times, “Respite from the cold and the gray in Belltown” December 5, 2003 Matthew Kangas
“Her new Suyama Space installation straddles painting and sculpture, extending the basic idea introduced at Kucera: Hundreds of strokes painted on transparent acetate rolls are first cut up, then layered and suspended from great heights in front of a wall. Rising to heights of over 20 feet, each assemblage manages to make the paint marks appear to float on the wall, in some cases hovering, in others, cascading like a waterfall of dots and dashes.”

Boise Weekly, “Painting as Sculpture: Katy Stone at the Boise Art Museum” May 4, 2005 Christopher Schnoor
“For this, her first solo museum exhibition, Stone created a site-specific sculptural installation entitled Fall. Comprised of three monumental vertical elements of cut and painted transparent archival acetate called Dura-Lar, they hang from the ceiling approximately 20 feet in height, with one continuing onto the floor. The work is a merging of mediums, a hybrid of painting, drawing, sculpture and installation which uses light, shadow and air movements to suggest a multiplicity of images and effects within BAM’s towering architectural framework.”

Sculpture: A Publication of the International Sculpture Center, “Katy Stone: Embodiments” September 2006 Christopher Schnoor
“Although Stone’s work certainly fits today’s more inclusive, pliable definition of sculpture, the label doesn’t quite do it justice. Intensely poetic, her art is a hybrid of painting, drawing, sculpture, relief, and installation in which two- and three-dimensional form, color, light, shadow, and air movement interact.”

LA Weekly, “Llyn Foulkes, Robert Dean Stockwell, Katy Stone” November 22, 2006 Peter Frank
Katy Stone shows her expansive, almost installational plastic sculptures with Foulkes’ large painting at Patricia Faure Gallery; Stone’s gentle colored rains, spattering down and around her cascades of transparent sheets, contrast thoroughly in spirit and in image with Foulkes’ ponderous picture, like a really dry wine paired with really bloody steak. Not to worry — Seattleite Stone’s precipitations rain on their own parade.

Seattle Weekly, “Steel Wind at Greg Kucera Gallery: Katy Stone passes on Dura-Lar for laser-cut steel” January 15, 2008 Adrianna Grant
“Nearly 11 feet wide by 14½ feet high, this construction, Edge of a World (wind), occupies the back gallery’s entire wall. Steel sweeps down in long, curved swathes. A few minimally detailed organic shapes—rough-edged branches with full blossoms—are caught at a 90-degree angle. In steel, Stone’s work is more solid and, somehow, more delicate as well. The edges are cut sharply, and instead of paint layered onto a clear ground, the edges pile up, creating a cleaner sculptural work, with strong shadows and a more defined physical presence.”

Studio 707, “From Gesture to monument: Artist Katy Stone at The Oxbow School for Ten-Day Residency” February 27, 2008
“Stone often begins a piece with what she called “stream-of-consciousness drawing,” in order to generate enough stuff to start making things. “I usually do a lot of painting until I get a form of gesture that really work, and then I repeat it,” she continued. The results can be breathtaking: A single droplet, repeated thousands of times, becomes a waterfall. A blade shape, multiplied, creates a field of grass. Dozens of small paintings, gathered together, express a different dynamic when they’re laid out in a circle than when they compose a broad band across a gallery wall. 

Missoulian, “‘a Season Swiling,’ sot as Stone – MAM installation a visceral ode to Montana’s seasons” April 24, 2008 Simone Ellis
“Stone was in Montana for the catastrophic fires of 2000 and left a year later for Seattle, so it is not surprising that fire arrived (uninvited) in this made-for-Montana installation. Perhaps the most beautiful flames one may ever get to examine burst over and out of the first wall; oranges, reds, yellows, caldrons and tongues recreate the dangerous beauty of fire in the wilderness. Equally compelling are the puffs, the clouds of smoke rising above the flames, curling around the corner at the ceiling, destroying the rectangular shape of the gallery in the process.”

Cincinnati Magazine, “A Big Splash” August 2008 Kathy Y. Wilson
“Seattle sculpture Katy Stone must be moved by the oil-on-water and elongated, string-cheese shapes formed organically in nature. In ACCUMULATIONS & CONSTRUCTIONS, layer upon ayer of painted Duralar – firmly plastic sheeting – exposes her fetish. Pieces like White Falls (Serpentine) explore with color and bring to mind shower curtains as waterfalls while Oil & Waterfall 6 (Bees) evokes the elasticity of rubber cement tears and mimics the tail of some exotic, pre-iPod mammal. Stone lists “cast shadows” among her influences and she’s right to do so.”

Flavorpill, “Katy Stone and Yvette Molina: Tickling Thicket” October 23, 2008 Jeanne Storck
The name of Johansson Projects’ new show, Tickling Thicket, suggests a children’s story tinged with dark humor, a suggestion Katy Stone and Yvette Molina successfully convey through their depictions of wild things and mysterious natural phenomena…Stone paints Duralar sheets in tones of black, gray, and amber, then cuts them into layers of jagged filigree that drift like sea anemones on the gallery wall. 

East Bay Express, “Critic’s Choice: Tickling Thicket” November 2008 DeWitt Cheng
“Yvette Molina’s paintings and Katy Stone’s wall constructions filture nature imagery through postmodern analysis, achieving lyrical beauty while asserting their identity as artifacts – hence, the show title, Tickling Thicket…Stone’s painted Duralar constructions, with their superimposed places and exposed hardware, recall the planar assemblages of Frank Stella and Tom Holland.

Inhabitat, “ORGANIC ART: Katy Stone and Yvette Molina Paintings” November 15, 2008 Moe Beitiks
“In Katy Stone’s work, acrylic paint is intertwined with a plastic sheeting called Duralar, which the Seattle-based artist then mounts on walls in full light to expose textures and contours. In fact, she claims “shadows” as one of her “materials used” in every piece. The resulting forms are spooky and organic– the shapes are reminiscent of the endless and gorgeous forms of nature often overlooked: flower stems, puddles, pistils, stamens, cells. The points, mounds, curls and empty spaces overlap and frame each other in ethereal microcosms.”

San Francisco Chronicle, “Don’t miss: ‘Tickling Thicket’” November 20, 2008 Mary Eisenhart
“This exhibition examines the bold designs, delicate beauty and eventual dissolution of the natural world. Katy Stone constructs vaguely foreboding 3-D installations of entangled tendrils…”

art ltd, “Katy Stone and Yvette Molina: ‘Tickling Thicket’ at Johansson Projects” December 2008, David M. Roth
“Stone, who lives and works in Seattle, doesn’t spend much time in nature. But she almost certainly fantasizes about it. She works quickly and spontaneously, painting hundreds of forms per day in a monochromatic palette of white, amber and black. There she assembles in improvised installations, creating the convincing illusion that they somehow sprouted organically.”

City Arts, “Beyond These Walls: Artist Katy Stone’s work is helping to transform lives, from King County Jail to Vienna” March 2010 Zachary Watterson
“Late last fall, Katy Stone and her two assistants, Kristin Ougendar and Mark Anderson, unveiled willowcloudwavescape, the new triptych installation at the King County Correctional Facility…Stone’s willowscape stands at twenty-four feet. The back of the aluminum cloudscape is painted with orange so that when you stand near it you see a pinkish glow, and when you stand at a distance the glow fades altogether. Her installation is “about transformation, beauty, expansiveness, calm,” Stone says.

Westword, “Robischon Shows Off With Linda Fleming: Lingering and Katy Stone: New Work, June 3, 2010 Michael Paglia
“The reconciliation of opposites is a key to Stone’s signature style. The works can be simultaneously monumental and insubstantial. They look spontaneous but are apparently intentionally complicated in their execution. And they are clearly abstract, but at the same time include a suggestion of the representation of natural things, like leaves, twigs, or even, as in “Glade,” a forest of trees.”

San Francisco Chronicle, “‘Bramblur’ at Johansson Projects, Oakland” July 24, 2011
“Bramblur: Paintings by Allison Gildersleeve; painted metal constructions by Katy Stone.”

East Bay Express, “Bramblur,” July 29, 2011 DeWitt Cheng
“Stone, known for her witty floral collages and installations of folded paper and painted Duralar drafting film (seven of which are included here), is showing new laser-cut metal reliefs, generally painted in bright oil enamels, which suggest natural forms and textures like bark and foliage as well as stylized flames and clouds (or Lichtenstein’s Pop stylings of AbEx brushstrokes).”

New American Paintings Blog, “Distilling To The Core: Katy Stone’s Myriad” December 22, 2011 Erin Langer
“Katy Stone’s Myriad visually reverberates throughout the otherwise silent rooms of Seattle’s Greg Kucera gallery.   The artist’s vibrant forms of painted aluminum are known for walking lines, fluctuating between two and three dimensions, between the linear and the organic, between painting and sculpture.  In her most recent body of work, these explorations expand to include additional mediums, as the oversized collage titled Myriad (You Are Here) extends across the floor, forming a 15 x 5 ft. centerpiece for the show.”

Artdaily, “Katy Stone’s debut solo show with Ryan Lee on view in New York” 2013 
“Inspired by natural and fantastical processes that exist on a cellular level, Stone’s sculptural assemblages simultaneously flow through states of micro and macro, investigating the suspended space between containment and release essential to transform. This tension between transience and permanence, nature and artifice, growth and decay is evident in each work.”

Flow, Just Flow: Variations on a Theme, “Katy Stone” January 29, 2013 Sarah Matheson
“Sometimes my works suggest what I like to call “nameable” things but equally they are about verbs—motions and actions. Despite the fact that they are frozen moments, they are very much implying ongoing motion, beyond the boundaries of what is seen. This tension between those two qualities of stillness and motion is interesting to me.”

Art in America, “Katy Stone at Ryan Lee, through Jan. 25” December 2013
“The Seattle-based artist, fascinated with natural processes from the cellular to the cosmic, presents a selection of brand-new works in her signature style. The droopy, swirly accumulations of colorful acetate or aluminum cutouts – most of them wall-hung – evoke virtually every imaginable composite that twists, falls or flows: water, willow trees, smoke, constellations. Her bright industrial materials imply an unusually cheerful dialogue between the organic and the manmade.”

luxe interiors + design, “The Abstract Artist: Katy Stone” 2014
“Today, Stone paints on plastic, paper and metal, and layers the elements into intricate assemblages that spread across walls or spill onto the floor, blurring the boundaries between drawing, painting and sculpture. “I love the line and fluidity of paint, and I love the directness and simplicity of drawing,” she says. “But I also like the expansive feeling when objects occupy space in some way, as in sculpture.” Not surprisingly, her abstract imagery invites interpretation. “I don’t intentionally make Rorschachs,” she says. “It’s just how my work happens.””

seattle.gov, “Katy Stone selected as artist for Seattle City Light Tech Training Center” February 27, 2014
“Seattle artist Katy Stone’s work is evocative of natural environments and ecological surfaces – water, plants, and other outdoor elements. Through her work, she brings the texture of nature inside the buildings and structures in which her work is placed.” 

In The Make, “Katy Stone” May 2014 
Partly, my work is about materiality, visual formal language and perceptual experience, pure and simple. On another level, I’m interested in using the forms and forces of nature as metaphors, to express/embody different states of emotion and being. There’s an ongoing theme in my work that has to do with transformation/transmutation, and at a deepest level there is something about the relationship between the momentary and the permanent.

Broke Ass Stuart, “Art Gallery You Should Know: Johansson Projects” November 5, 2015 Marilyn Jones
“Seattle based Stone is influenced by the supernatural world and how it coincides with the natural and reflects such in her geographic landscapes. Using laser-cut oil on aluminum, her black and red Forest Eye, reminds the viewer of what is happening to our forests by flame.”

SF Gate, “Artists’ layered work seemed a good match at Johansson” December 22, 2015 Kimberly Chun
“Coastal Coven” — the title of the current Johansson Projects exhibition showcasing works by Corvallis, Ore., artist Anna Fidler and Seattle artist Katy Stone — conjures up earth magic associations: rituals over beach bonfires or windswept get-downs on cliffs overlooking the ocean.”

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