Craig Cree Stone’s energy is intellectual and playful. He challenges you conceptually, perceptually and literally but with a dollop of humor.

Stone’s sculptures, paintings and installations are more about ideas than about surface or form, although his work is nearly always beautiful. The objects are constructed according to the way they have been depicted, either in drawings, paintings or media photographs. The quixotic constructions address issues of identity on many fronts. For instance, in work done in the late 1980s. Stone assumed fictional personas to take credit for his work: Stella Jumping Eagle, Michi No Kogeni and Martin Rabinowitz, to name a few. The pieces from this era confront notions of what is identified as male or female, Native American, Asian or Jewish, while simultaneously challenging rules of visual perception by means of false shadows, mirrors and contrary use of materials. These elegant sculptures tease, all the while examining how insidiously perception and self-identification are prescribed and limited by cultural stereotyping. Stone describes a trapezoidal, footed cabinet, painted in shades of burnt sienna, aqua and blue-gray, titled Masculine Ties (Male Ritual Object), as a polychrome phalliform container for lengths of ornamental fabric worn dangling from the neck. The piece poses the question, does the tie make the man?

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