Katy Stone : Transmissions

Following a creatively freeing experience of an artist-in-residence program at Seattle’s Oxbow, Washington artist Katy Stone returns to Robischon Gallery with a fresh body of work that came to fruition as a direct result of the recent residency. In past work, Stone’s conceptual inspiration often resided in the intimate natural world overtly reminiscent of landscape forms or botanical-influenced elements. For “Transmissions,” the artist takes a wider abstract view; an expansion that encompasses notions of the terrestrial and cosmological while still exploring innovative materiality. With painted, pierced or sanded Duralar, burnished aluminum, lenticular film and glowing washes of paint, Stone reflects that, “Over the course of two months at Oxbow, I continued to build upon my long-term investigations into materials that convey the sense of light. Pushing further into abstraction, my imagery has coalesced into forms that speak on multiple levels. Here in the exhibition are continent-like maps, elliptical planets, sweeping air and light currents; terrains of earth, space or the body; beams, passages, velocities – all with a richness of diverse materials.”

While all of Stone’s works are transformative with respect to light, in this newest series the artist balances subtle and intentionally minimized shadow-as-element effect, as she contemplates the sanded, mirrored Duralar and electric hues that provide a kind of self-illumination. This shift to a more diffused approach enabled her to respond, in form, to the sun’s corona during the silvery, luminescent totality of the 2017 eclipse in addition to a dramatic weather occurrence which are now visually imprinted and translated into the burnished and painted circular Corona and the opalescent linear Transmission (electric line). With her distinctive approach, Katy Stone’s creatively assembled work continues to push the edges of abstraction while blurring the traditional boundaries between sculpture, painting and drawing in space.

Katy Stone received her BFA from Iowa State University and her MFA from the University of Washington. The artist recently completed a residency at Oxbow, Seattle, WA, and has received a Seattle Public Utilities Purchase Award, Seattle, WA, GAP Grant, Artist Trust, Seattle, WA, along with an Oxbow School Visiting Artist award, Oxbow School, Napa, CA, Seattle Collects Purchase Award, Seattle, WA, Missoula Trust for Artist Grant, Missoula, MT, Best of Show Award and two Best of Show awards at Pacific Northwest Annual, Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, WA and Best of Show Award. Stone’s work is in the collections of the Boise Art Museum, City of Seattle, McNay Museum, San Antonio, Texas, Missoula Art Museum, Iowa State University, IA, Michigan State University, MI and Twin Parks, Taichung, Taiwan with large-scale installations in the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, Ann Arbor, MI, Microsoft, Redmond, WA, Twitter, San Francisco, CA,  Facebook Menlo Park CA, King County Correctional Facility, Horizon House and Swedish Medical Center, all in Seattle, WA, a Daniel Libeskind-designed building, The Ascent, in Covington, KY, the Federal Courthouse, Jackson Mississippi and the corporate offices of Conoco Phillips in Houston, TX, Sound Transit Light Rail South Bellevue Station, Bellevue, WA and Seattle City Light Technical Training