Billis/Williams Gallery is pleased to present FRED STONEHOUSE: BUST the gallery’s second solo exhibition of paintings by the Wisconsin-based artist. The exhibition opens with a reception on November 15th and continues through December 20th.
Fred Stonehouse is well known for his darkly whimsical compositions with humorous and sometimes cutting bits of text. In this new series, aptly titled Bust, Stonehouse is exploring portraiture featuring only the head and shoulders (a bust) as well as the parallel meaning of ‘to cause a collapse or to lose everything’ (to go bust, busted).
Bust explores a talismanic presence – a mysterious personal totem or spirit figure in both human and animal form. Stonehouse describes the source of these figures as dreams in which he “sense[s] a figure or presence that is lurking just out of sight, maybe somewhere just behind […], down very low or looming above.” In these paintings, it is as if the artist is rendering each facet of his fears and hopes and dreams and worries. The paintings speak to the confusion and the illogical nature of dreams – the topsy-turvy unsettled feeling when you wake up from a particularly intense session of REM. Stonehouse oscillates between including and not including text in his work. In the paintings where it is included, the chaos is contained by the words – the artist is able to decipher the message while in others with no text, the chaos looms large and we experience along with the artist that unexplainable feeling of waking from a dream with intensely illogical emotions that we sense deeply as truth.
From a formal standpoint, the head and shoulders format provides Stonehouse a structure within which to explore color, symmetry, and pattern. The tension between ornamental flatness and naturalistic volume in these works has pushed Stonehouse’s practice into new visual terrain. Weaving garish color, unnatural facial features, and non-human forms, these paintings play with the grotesque and its function in questioning cultural systems through the distortion of classical ideas of harmony and the inversion of norms (Astruc).
Deeply symbolic and laden with meaning, Stonehouse’s paintings depict archetypes and then skewer them and in so doing, undermine the dominant narratives that don’t serve us well. By bringing them out of the shadows and laying them bare in the light of day, we are forced to look. These highly personal dream forces, be they demons or imps or angels or gurus, are deep parts of our psyches and can be powerful guides in our lives. Many of the these characters feel very personal but others feel like frightening statements about where we are as a society. There is a universal in the personal and by cataloging and naming that which we fear, we as collective humanity can move forward with greater awareness.
Fred Stonehouse (b.1960, Milwaukee, WI) received his BFA from UW Milwaukee in 1982. He had his first solo show in Chicago in 1983 and has exhibited widely throughout the United States as well as in Mexico, Amsterdam, Rome, and Berlin. His work is included in numerous private collections as well as in the public collections of the Block Museum (Northwestern University, Evanston, IL), Chazen Museum of Art (University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI), Haggerty Museum of Art (Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI), Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (Madison, WI), Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee, WI), Museum of Wisconsin Art (West Bend, WI), San Jose Art Museum (San Jose, CA), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), and the University of Arizona Art Museum (Tucson, AZ). Stonehouse was the recipient of an NEA Arts Midwest Grant and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Individual Artists Grant. He is currently an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Wisconsin.
