Latency II

graphite, conte, photograph, tinted, transparent Plexiglas, enamelled hardware, h 48" x w 31"

Exhibition Statement Excerpt: 
Caelum Gallery, Manhattan, “About Surface”

For three decades, Judith Stone’s drawings have addressed the gritty subject of construction sites. Originally directed at the ancient and contemporary built landscape in transition, the focus of the work since 1985 has been the very machinery of the earth moving process: shovels, booms, cranes, backhoes, hooks. Indeed, the sites, and the machines and the materials that transform them, may be viewed as theatrical stages for the drama of humankind imposing order on an apparently unruly natural world. Ironically, while the elements in Stone’s images depict a situation that is inherently dynamic, the photographs that inform the drawings are taken during off-hours, after the workers have left the site and the machines are at rest. For the artist, the stillness of the abandoned sites suggests a classical ruin, or a “ghost town” in the American West.

Moreover, much of Stone’s recent work displays a shift to a set of motifs that diverge from those found in earlier pieces: looping ropes, cliffsides, ravines, and gorges, glimpses of horses, fragments of organic growth. However, change in content notwithstanding, the compositional norms that have characterized Stone’s work throughout her career are retained in the “rope” pieces: assymetry, and tracts of white space balanced by closely observed rendering of shapes and textures.