selected EXHIBITION Statements:

Caelum Gallery, Manhattan, “About Surface”
February-March 2001

Press Release:

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. 

Of course, the introduction of new content in recent pieces necessarily alters their “message” and impact on the viewer. This is particularly true in the Stronghold series, in which a second photographic level,in a bi-level image, reflects Stone’s encounter with the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum: a fallen equestrian, the wild-eyed head of a rearing horse, a renegade stallion restrained by its youthful rider...all naturalistic marble carvings created in deep historical time, yet uncannily immediate.

While the initial drawings in Stone’s oeuvre were just that, graphite renderings on paper, the technical evolution in her work has moved through the addition of graphite washes to the current mix of media:  graphite line and wash; colored conté and/or pastel, a tinted, transparent Plexiglas pane masking a second level of camera image, the occasional punctuating presence of found metal shards. In some larger work, the Plexiglas pane has been supplanted by a Plexi box, also tinted and transparent, allowing for the intrusion of a second visual “event” within the primary image.

Most disorienting in Stone’s work is the inconsistency between a highly polished surface and, certainly in the case of the machine imagery, severe, sometimes even threatening content. This gap, both technical and emotional, hardly indicates the artist’s intention. Simply stated, Stone loves to draw, and in the attentive way that is her trademark. Developing an edge, a tonal gradation, a rich texture carries for her the sweetness of a caress. That she is frequently bringing to optical life a hook, a shovel, a boom, a wrecking ball through meticulous rendering seems to her anything but a paradox. She denies the fearsome qualities some find in the deliberate, seemingly inexorable movement of the huge machines and the cacaphony of construction site activity. Indeed, the spur to much of her image-making -- positioned on the sidelines, watching men manipulate their powerful equipment -- is for her at once mesmerizing and galvanizing.

In a lecture delivered shortly before his death, the California architect Frank Israel defined Bertolucci’s film The Conformist as a narrative “about surface”. Stone, in turn, found both the film, which addresses passivity and conformism during the Mussolini era and Israel’s terse descriptor, electrifying. Her own work, she believes, is similarly “about surface”, about the skin of here-and-now experience. Be it calm and routine, or tumultuous and disruptive, understood as a permeable surface that invites imaginative penetration. As she witnesses, for example, the erection of a building at a local construction site, she recalls her surprise at the scaffolding surrounding Taipei’s monument to Chiang Kai-Shek. As she contemplates a factory smoke-stack, her mind moves laterally to the pillars of the Cardo in Jerusalem’s Old City. As she roams the cliffsides of New Mexico’s Canyon de Chelly, she visualizes Fifth Century Athenian life on stony hillsides. Thus, Stone’s work combines into one seamless whole two levels of perception: a  richly understood present, a substratum of personal and communal memory.   

L’Espace 234, Montreal, “Ropes and Knots”
May 28 - July 8, 2002

Press Release:

Certain phenomena in the natural and manmade cosmos invite, seduce, or compel the artist to render them in graphite line and wash: certain shapes and textures; certain implicit qualities of weight, mass, and potential force or energy. The ropes that wind, stretch, loop, curl, and resolve themselves into knots in the images comprising “Ropes and Knots” carry this siren quality. However, the rope motif, the “constant” in the exhibit, was not chosen solely for its aesthetic qualities; nor, for that matter, were the contextual elements: the rendered or photographed “variables” brought into play in the work: the canyons, the horses, the weathered beams, the ancient pillars.

The ropes are alive with connotation. At once flexible and tensile, a length of rope can link, bind, and secure as easily as it can strangle; it can hoist heavy objects up, suspend them in midair, and gradually let them down, a singular feat carried out by what may seem, at a distance, a line in space. Moreover, as quickly as we can envision a noose,we can as readily see, in the mind’s eye, the ultimate rope connector, the umbilical cord.

The images in “Ropes and Knots” were developed recently in response to several decades of travel, in particular to England, to the American West, and to Israel. Initially envisoning the ropes as sturdy ladders leading from desert clifftops to canyon floors in Arizona and new Mexico, the artist actually borrowed their forms from photos taken at nautical sites in Northern England. Only in dreams and in art can such transference, meeting, and merging take place.

Caelum Gallery, Manhattan, “Constructing Constructions”, 2009

Artist Statement:

One can draw an analogy between the fabrication of a mixed media work of art and the erection of a built structure. The analogy may, at first, appear a loose, imperfect one, operating in the realm of metaphor, where poetic discourse meets concrete experience. However, it surely becomes more plausible when the central motif in the work of a mixed media artist is the very machinery that enables the raising of a edifice. This is certainly the case for the body of work comprising “Constructing Constructions”, now on exhibit at Caelum Gallery. We know, of course, that the primary goal guiding the efforts of architects and engineers on a construction site is utility, while aesthetic seduction and compelling expression determine the process of an artist in her studio. Nevertheless, what the accomplished architect, engineer, and mixed media artist clearly share is their skill and precision in the manipulation of materials in the manufacture of a coherent product.

Judith Stone’s bi-level, wall-hung pieces do indeed invite technical study. However, far more critical to their appreciation is full understanding of the link between the rendered and photographic imagery in each piece and the artist’s chief preoccupations, those generated by global travel, coupled with those emerging from inward exploration. For example, the opulent window displays and glittering indoor fountains recorded by the Stone’s camera in the “Tokyo/Upsurge” series refer to the astonishing year she spent in Tokyo in the mid-1980's, a boom period for Japan in general and Tokyo in particular. What most magnetized the artist was the pervasive incorporation of Western norms, in both commerce and fashion, in an urban context that nonetheless remained utterly Asian and alien. In a smaller body of work, in such pieces as “Facts on the Ground I & II”, ancient Hebrew and Roman stone structures in Jerusalem’s Old City point to a more profound concern, one that is closer to the bone: the artist’s ongoing investigation of her Jewishness and her parent’s Zionism.

Binding the disparate content in the greater number of Stone’s images is earth moving equipment itself, a constant in a wealth of variables. Her stylized bead on tractors, cranes, booms, and backhoes bespeaks her long-term fascination with the machinery’s ponderous, deliberate movement when at work on site, and the latent power they suggest when at rest. 

Like the architect and the engineer, the mixed media artist occasionally hits snags, intractable problems in assembly and, worse yet, completed pieces that fall short in visual coherence and/or expressivity. Stone confesses to predictable frustration when a work in progress doesn’t work. But overriding the frustration is her commitment to revision. Most commonly, the revision takes the form of elimination, the cutting, tearing, burning away of extraneous elements. The work on exhibit at Caelum reflects that impulsion to steamline, to pare away the inessential, in its forthright severity.

Castleton Downtown Gallery: “See Feelingly: Weigh and Balance”
September 23 - October 24, 2015

Artist’s Statement

Some months back, when I began orchestrating this exhibit in my mind’s eye, I felt the lure of words spoken by the Duke of Gloucester in Shakespeare’s most complex tragedy, “King Lear”: “I see it feelingly.” Late in the play, Gloucester, having been horrifically blinded in the literal sense, humbly allows that he has thereby gained clarity in the moral sense. Now sightless, he claims he has instead greater insight into both the complex bonds of his immediate family and those of the broader political realm from which he is now alienated. And so, while not literally blind myself, I’ve appropriated Shakespeare’s subtle play with the metaphor of “sight”, because it best conveys the ultimate relatedness of what may seem unrelated elements in each of my mixed media pieces.. 

When I initiate a piece in my studio, I start with a drawing of some mundane emblem of modern life, most commonly those big, loud machines that routinely make inroads, for good or ill, on our natural environment. Less commonly, I draw a stretch of looped or knotted rope.  But the raw, bully reality of the machines, or the more pliant reality of the ropes, are just the beginning. As the graphite image emerges, I am alert to the equally “real” associations I’m making mentally, between the concrete here and now, and what I recall from my past: my travels and long stays on four continents, my exposure to virtually every variety of landscape and city- scape, and, of equal importance, personal attachments formed along the way. And those associations are suffused with feeling.

As I sand and scar my paper to mimic the distressed surface of a shovel, I may recall my first encounter with the pillars of the ancient Roman marketplace in Jerusalem’s walled Old City, or I may call to mind the sloped walls of Kyoto’s Nijo Castle. As my pencil defines each twist of a length of rope, I remember the sheer drop from the top edge of the Canyon de Chelly to the distant canyon floor, a floor only accessible by rope ladder for hundreds of years. And as I assemble the multiple elements of a piece - drawing, photograph, Plexiglas sheet or box, monochrome pastel or conté flat, enameled found object - I am weighing and balancing... medium with medium, perceptible present with recollected past, material fact with throbbing feeling, and hoping the result will convey seamless, but still dynamic equilibrium.