ONCE AROUND THE SUN
NEW PORCH SWING ORCHESTRA ALBUM
Available now for pre-order. Click the link below.Once Around the Sun (2018-2019) collects 16 of these recordings and images made during PSO's first year. While most of the pieces were made on my porch in Austin, Texas, a few were also created in faraway places such as Spiral Jetty in Utah, Bailey Island, Maine, and under a massive bridge near Del Rio, Texas.
The album will be available in Deluxe Limited edition of 25 in lathe-cut clear vinyl, which includes a 36-page full color booklet featuring the images that correspond to each track.
Lathe records take time to make and each order takes about 8 weeks to complete and orders will be placed as payments are recieved.
The pre-order price for the lp and book is $100. This will include high res digital audio files for your streaming pleasure.
Drift Reviewed in April 2021 Edition of ARTFORUM
Barry Stone, Box of Prints Thrown from the Car, US I-59 Outside Fort Payne, Alabama, 2018, ink-jet print, 13 × 19Barry Stone
KLAUS VON NICHTSSAGEND GALLERY
Every picture tells—no, needs a story. The eleven mostly black-and-white photographs (and a zine-like publication assembled from photocopies) that made up “Drift,” Barry Stone’s solo exhibition here, are striking enough at first sight—but they’re also mysterious, both individually and as an ensemble. Water is a recurring element: as the backdrop for the hands holding the vulnerable-looking little sea creature in Hermit Crab, Bailey Island, Maine, 2018, or the substance on which a couple of kids back-float in Floating, Birmingham, Alabama, 2018. In Rainbowed Seaweed, Bailey Island, Maine, 2017–20, we see no figurative presence, just the strangely scrambled-looking wave patterns with subtle resonances of color here and there. Water can even be conspicuous by its absence: Why, for instance, in Floating on the Grass, Bailey Island, Maine, 2018, is that girl ensconced in an inflatable lounger not in a pool but on a wide expanse of lawn? But then some of the works depart from this theme, as does Road Marks, US I-59 Outside Fort Payne, Alabama, 2018, which images skid tracks going off into the distance and crossing the broken white line of the highway.
Some of the images are meta-images, and with these the titles start to give some clues as to the show’s backstory: Take Box of Prints Thrown from the Car, US I-59 Outside Fort Payne, Alabama, 2018, in which a hand holds up a bashed and scuffed-up photograph of a kneeling kid prostrate in shallow water, framed, so to speak, by half of an equally damaged storage box. This image connects to Truck Driver’s Wife Picks Up Prints, US I-59 Outside Fort Payne, Alabama, 2018, in which a woman, her hands full of paper and cardboard, stoops by the roadside to pick up some more. But the full explanation comes only in the gallery press release: The images record, as we learn,
a car accident Stone’s family survived while on a summer road trip from their home in Austin, Texas, to Bailey Island, Maine. In addition to smashing the family car, the crash caused a portfolio of Stone’s photographs taken the previous summer to scatter across the highway. . . . Stone at once began photographing the scene of the accident, and as the family resumed their journey north, he continued to take pictures of their trip.
It would be too facile but not entirely wrong to read this story as a reiteration of the old saw about lemons and lemonade—a demonstration of the necessary resilience and resourcefulness elicited by the artmaking impulse. Of course, the ability to recover is also dependent on luck: That Stone could think of using his camera in the wake of the collision suggests that, thank goodness, no one was badly hurt. In any case, the tone of these works is hardly one of triumph, or even of relief at having escaped a worse fate. What unites the images made after the accident—those taken at the scene, and the ones created earlier, then reworked—is a mood that is pensive and a worldview in which people, like hermit crabs, seem quite small, isolated, and (this is not a photography pun) exposed. The photos show bodies, but faces are hardly to be seen, which I think implies that existence is not locked into the illusory security of identity. Living life and making art mean being caught up in a fluid medium, one not under control, and staying with it.
— Barry Schwabsky
Read original article here.
Drift
Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, NYC
Opens January 15 and runs until February 20, 2021
Floating, Birmingham, Alabama, 2018 Archival Inkjet Print 24 × 36 inches
Drift is an exhibition of straight, rephotographed, and glitched
photographs spanning a three-year period which all orbit around an auto accident
on an interstate highway.
The first thing you should know is that we lived. For a second there, I wasn’t sure if we would. They say when you think you’re about to die, your life flashes before your eyes. I don’t think that’s necessarily true*
The word drift dates back to the early 14th century. It is possibly a suffixed form of the verb “drive” and is defined as "… being driven, hence anything driven, especially a number of things or a heap of matter driven or moving together.” The word contains the figurative sense of "aim, intention, what one is getting at" (on the notion of "course, tendency") from 1520s. Maybe the most apt pair of etymologies of “drift” apply to a path and its diversion, and the twining of ocean voyages and high car velocities contained in the nautical sense described as a "deviation of a ship from its course in consequence of currents" from 1670s and from 1955, a "controlled slide of a sports car.”
The first thing you should know is that we lived. For a second there, I wasn’t sure if we would. They say when you think you’re about to die, your life flashes before your eyes. I don’t think that’s necessarily true*
The word drift dates back to the early 14th century. It is possibly a suffixed form of the verb “drive” and is defined as "… being driven, hence anything driven, especially a number of things or a heap of matter driven or moving together.” The word contains the figurative sense of "aim, intention, what one is getting at" (on the notion of "course, tendency") from 1520s. Maybe the most apt pair of etymologies of “drift” apply to a path and its diversion, and the twining of ocean voyages and high car velocities contained in the nautical sense described as a "deviation of a ship from its course in consequence of currents" from 1670s and from 1955, a "controlled slide of a sports car.”
We had been clipped by an eighteen-wheeler. We spun twice
before hitting the side of the road and bouncing off of that. However, I do
remember getting out of the car. I was shaking so hard despite the fact that it
was ninety degrees outside. We stood on the side of the road for about ten
minutes before my mom started crying. I held her in my arms as I stared blankly
at our wrecked car. Then it hit me.
I could have died. And with me my family. Tiny oceans flowed from my eyes. There stood my sister, my mom and I, crying so hard it seemed like there was no other sound in the world.
My dad came over to us sometime after.*
I had been making photographs of the scene. I told myself that the images were for insurance or legal purposes. I was also doing what I have done most of my adult life, establishing an order out of chaos with a camera. I photographed skid marks, our totaled car, and the partner of the driver who hit us picking up prints of my daughters marked by tire treads and grass stains.
I could have died. And with me my family. Tiny oceans flowed from my eyes. There stood my sister, my mom and I, crying so hard it seemed like there was no other sound in the world.
My dad came over to us sometime after.*
I had been making photographs of the scene. I told myself that the images were for insurance or legal purposes. I was also doing what I have done most of my adult life, establishing an order out of chaos with a camera. I photographed skid marks, our totaled car, and the partner of the driver who hit us picking up prints of my daughters marked by tire treads and grass stains.
I was enraged of the capriciousness of it all,
and how figuratively and metaphorically this stranger held our lives in their hands.
I was also troubled that I found a small pleasure in making pictures in the face
of such trauma.
We could have turned around or flown home. Instead, we rented a car and kept driving, right up to Maine. We had just experienced the most traumatic moment in our family’s history, but we persisted. Things may happen, bad things that you can’t predict. They change you but they don’t stop you.*
It is commonly suggested that in order to overcome trauma, we must change our narratives surrounding the root cause of our unease. I began to reframe, rephotograph, and alter the digital code of the images that surrounded the event to reconsider the accident not as a senseless near fatal accident, but one of miraculous survival.
*passages written by my daughter who was thirteen at the time of its writing in 2018
We could have turned around or flown home. Instead, we rented a car and kept driving, right up to Maine. We had just experienced the most traumatic moment in our family’s history, but we persisted. Things may happen, bad things that you can’t predict. They change you but they don’t stop you.*
It is commonly suggested that in order to overcome trauma, we must change our narratives surrounding the root cause of our unease. I began to reframe, rephotograph, and alter the digital code of the images that surrounded the event to reconsider the accident not as a senseless near fatal accident, but one of miraculous survival.
*passages written by my daughter who was thirteen at the time of its writing in 2018
Where We Live (12.25.2020)
Where We Live is a series of images that result from combining the code of front page of the New York Times with a photograph taken during a neighborhood walk.