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Grace Stoner
Grace Stoner’s work blends art history with contemporary internet culture, inviting viewers to reconsider how images gain authority and meaning across time. In "Baroque art if it was good”, rendered with colored pencil, watercolor, and gouache, she melds the visual language of traditional Western painting and digital meme imagery into a new language. The familiar pose and careful realism echo technically masterful traditions, yet the subject, a derpy cat, subverts that seriousness. The piece politely satirizes the reverence often given to historical painting, especially when it is used to dismiss or diminish contemporary forms of expression.
Her porcelain vase, “Department of Generational Embarrassment,” brings this commentary into three dimensions. Its shape was modeled after European and Chinese porcelain vases, and the blue, painted designs after Medici porcelain. While referring to these traditions, the “Doge” dog, a symbol of internet culture, is depicted with realistic detail. The urn-like form suggests a memorial to the meme’s evolution and decline as it became institutionalized with “Dogecoin,” a cryptocurrency, as well as the death of the original dog, Kabosu.
Together, these works explore how images are copied, transformed, and repurposed, whether through centuries-old craft traditions or the rapid circulation of digital culture.