Photo courtesy of Newcity
Ben Stone’s sculptures elevate ubiquitous icons and visual ephemera through a compulsive attention to detail and fastidious production quality. He has built his career on a sensitive study of ever-present imagery from advertising and signage, public speech, and encounters in his daily life. By enlarging the scale of his source material and remaking it into a three-dimensional form, he transforms a derivative of a derivative into a decoded, unconditioned original.
Stone explores the contemporary psyche as he reckons with violence and corruption in his midst and in society at large; his frustration with politics, both local and national; bad or just plain weird public iconography; and his own self-worth as an artist. Stone's sincere pursuit of profundity buried inside sloppy, oversimplified imagery and lazy ideas transcends irony, edging toward the tragicomic. As James Yood noted in art ltd., Stone is “so sensitively attuned to the pathetic earnestness of lowbrow culture as to always make it seem dignified and important.”
Stone’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, Artnet, ArtSlant, Beautiful Decay, Newcity and the New Art Examiner. "Stone assumes the role of interlocutor, a champion of an art earnest in all its intentions regardless of its humble origins,” wrote critic Susan Snodgrass in Art in America in 2011.
His work has also been discussed on the podcast Bad at Sports and featured on newscasts of several Chicago TV stations. Exhibitions include those at the Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee; Regina Rex, NYC; Locust Projects, Miami; Ten in One, NYC; among others.
Stone received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He lives in Berwyn, IL, and is represented by Western Exhibitions.