Deb Stoner, Garden Studies

April 13 – June 4, 2019
Artist reception Saturday April 13, 2019, 5-8pm

Imogen Gallery
240 11th St
Astoria, OR 97103
503-468-0620
info@imogengallery.com
Daily (Wed by appointments): 11AM to 5PM
Sundays 11AM to 4PM
http://imogengallery.com/painters-print-makers/deb-stoner
www.debstoner.com

Garden Studies
The past few years have been tumultuous by anyone’s accounting. Fires and tsunamis and insane leaders of the world give me a distinct feeling of the world being out of control. Perhaps it is my art work that grounds me, that gives me at least an illusion of being in control, if only on the 8.5”x11.7” scanner glass on which I compose my still life photographs.

I make high resolution images of things I gather in nature, from intensely dense urban floral gardens to experimental vegetable breeding gardens. This year was the first where I made photographs from the mobile studio that my partner made from a 1952 vintage trailer, marking freedom from the tether of my usual home studio. Some of these photographs have come from that experience. All are a continuation of a large ongoing body of work called “A Year in the Willamette Valley”, a reference to place and time. Obviously inspired by 16th and 17th century European floral painters, as well as the natural/fake large scale dioramas in natural history museums, I’m mostly interested in making beautiful compositions. The scanner, as my photographic tool of choice, reveals extraordinary details far beyond the ability of my unaided eyes. My obsession is paying attention to phenomenal and ephemeral events in gardens throughout the year and making images with them in real time.
This opportunity to show at Imogen Gallery coincided with my having access to a large printer. I’ve always made my work to a very high resolution with large scale in mind, and I sit for hours in front of my computer prepping the images so that they can be printed this large. But only rarely have I seen my work in its physical self this big, and it’s exciting for me to see these massive unwieldy paper objects crowded into this tiny space.
This fall I’ll get to see the work even larger…I won a juried competition to have my images printed on vinyl to wrap the Palos Verdes Art Center in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. Yep, the whole building exterior. Watch this space for details!

Deb Stoner holds an MFA in Applied Design from SDSU, a BS in Geology from UC Davis, and a decades long teaching career at Oregon College of Art and Craft. Recently she presented lectures on photography to the Yuma Symposium, the Portland Art Museum, the SPE NW Regional Conference; had solo shows in 2017, 2016 and 2015, with two scheduled for 2019; numerous group shows; juried purchases in the permanent public art collections at University of Oregon, OHSU, PCC, and the Portland International Airport; is the recipient of grants and a recent residency; and sells work to enthusiastic collectors.