"Static (Horizontal)" before live installation during opening reception.
"Static (Horizontal)" completed during opening reception.
We would like to extend our thanks to Holly Myers, for writing such a concise and glowing account of David's history as an artist here in Los Angeles, as well as the relevance of this show.
Review:
LA Times, May 25th, 2007 Around the Galleries by Holly Myers
(second segment)"David E. Stone, Artwork in an echo chamber"...
It can be difficult to get a handle on what David E. Stone is up to from news releases, announcements or other documentation because his projects — conceptual in nature and thus difficult to capture in a jpeg — tend to involve a rather baffling number of parts.
His first project in Los Angeles, launched immediately upon his arrival from Sacramento in 2004, consisted of 12 consecutive one-month exhibitions and a dizzying proliferation of multiples, including two series available by monthly subscription (in editions of 12 and 365, respectively); a series of 365 prints, each in an edition of two, auctioned one per day throughout the year on EBay; and a variety of wallet-sized trading cards, available both signed and unsigned, in limited and unlimited editions.
Got that?
His current exhibition at Gallery Revisited has had two parts. The first was up for three days before the opening and didn't involve any artwork, just printed signs describing the works in his last exhibition at the gallery, in September.
The second, installed over the course of the opening, includes a dozen of his own works plus works by three other artists (despite its purporting to be a solo show): Richard Haley, Stephen Kaltenbach and Cathy Stone.
The conceptual basis for all this rigmarole is quite clever, fortunately, and does ultimately reward the attention it demands. The show's title, "Rethinking (what has already been committed to memory)," is a play on the name of the gallery, as was the first half's "revisiting" of previous works. The show's invitation depicts a photograph of the word "rethinking" handwritten and erased multiple times. The three guest artists all revisit some previous work of Stone's, and Cathy Stone's drawing mimics the invite, using only the word "remember."
The works themselves echo the works in the previous show on a formal level as well. A close-up photograph of contact lenses, for instance, hangs on a wall that previously held works involving record albums; a low black platform loaded with thumbtacks and paper clips appears in a spot that previously held a similar platform with a few hundred puzzle pieces.
The works also echo one another. The tacks and paper clips, for instance, are a three-dimensional approximation of the two-dimensional work that hangs just above: a photograph of television static.
Disentangling these threads can be entertaining, but what holds the show together is the quiet formal elegance of the pieces themselves: the contact lenses with their soft lavender glow, the glint of the paper clips below the snow of the static, and a photograph of matchbooks stacked on a reflective surface (the reflection being a "revisited" version of the image?), to name a few.
