Deb Stoner, Pay Attention To What You Pay Attention To

Portland Art Museum Photography Council’s
Brown Bag Lunch Talk Series

Wednesday, March 21st, 2018 at Noon

Portland Art Museum
Miller Gallery in the Mark building
1219 SW Park Avenue, Portland, OR 97205
www.portlandartmuseum.org
503 226 2811
Cost: Free to the public.

For this presentation, I’ll talk about my life and career as an artist. I’ll tell you about my work of part-time teaching, making art objects for others, designing eyewear for fashion industry, and running a small business. I’ll show you the work I did that led me through designing, making and teaching about eyewear as a jeweler, and how that informed and directed me in making my current work. Photography has always been a part of it, but had been the part of my artistic practice that gets attention when I’m not too busy doing other things to earn a living. In the past five years, that has changed, with my full time commitment to making still life photographs of flora and tiny fauna. I’ll show you lots of images that might increase your awareness of how beautiful the world is, and what inspires me. I’ll tell you about the technology I use to make my work, and I’ll reveal the secret of how it is that the grasshopper is as big as the watermelon in this picture, without using digital trickery.

Deb Stoner is a fine art photographer with deep roots in craft. Deb creates still life photographs that are complex visual constructs made using the flora and fauna of a very small region, usually her neighborhood. Her work involves growing plants (or making friends with gardeners), collecting and mounting insects, and paying attention to small ephemeral events to make images with in real time. She earned an MFA in Applied Design from SDSU, a BS in Geology from UC Davis, and has taught in the Jewelry and Metals Department at Oregon College of Art and Craft since 1991, except for a few years along the way. Deb is known for her work in designing and making eyewear from a jeweler’s point of view, for developing new ideas in eyewear for the fashion industry, and for teaching those ideas to students in over fifty workshops at craft centers worldwide. As a photographer, Deb had a solo show at the Camerawork Gallery, was a Critical Mass finalist and a speaker at the SPE NW Regional Conference in 2015, a year-long solo exhibit at the Portland International Airport in 2016, a solo exhibition with Vernissage in Portland in 2017, and a recent lecture and exhibition at the Yuma Art Center/Symposium. Her photographs are in the public art collections of PCC, the University of Oregon, the Port of Portland, OHSU, the homes of many collectors, and in the juried NW Viewing Drawers at Blue Sky Gallery each year since 2015.