Unanticipated Despair (Despite Prior Naive Optimism)

PastExhibition

Jan 1

David E. Stone
Unanticipated Despair (Despite Prior Naive Optimism)

January 10 - February 7, 2009

David E Stone is a conceptual artist based in Los Angeles who has been active in the visual arts in California for more than thirty years as an artist, gallerist, and curator. Stone’s artistic practice is driven by his fascination with how reality can be perceived, both intellectually and physically. Using materials as diverse as digital prints, paintings, neon sculptures, and installations, Stone’s work ranges from the humorously accessible to the curiously poetic.

Unanticipated Despair (Despite Prior Naïve Optimism) presents large-scale archival digital photographs, a neon sculpture, and an installation of brightly colored broken glass. The exhibition contains numerous photographic images where the objects of the images are being viewed through an intermediate lens of some kind. Car chases are viewed through television screens, a power line is viewed in parallax through the lens of an eyeglass, and a dead butterfly is photographed on the bumper of a car. Some of the photographic images, such as the leavings of an Easter dinner and the aforementioned dead butterfly, serve to evoke feelings of revulsion in the viewer. Thematically, these images serve to challenge whether our perceptions of the world are truly as unmediated and pure as we would believe them to be. Unanticipated Despair shows us several different filters that affect our perceptions of the world, such as the media and our feelings, and asks us to look more closely at the process by which we assign meaning to sensory and cultural input. With the neon sculpture that unites the show, Stone declares all perceptions and all meanings transient, and suggests that we would be naïve indeed to believe otherwise.