Tony Bluestone
Yoga Body
June 20th–August 18th, 2021
Opening Reception, Sunday June 20th, 3-6pm*
Prattsville Art Center
14562 MAIN STREET
Prattsville, New York
The Prattsville Art Center is pleased to announce Yoga Body, an exhibition of new works by Tony Bluestone. Through the use of discomfort and humor, these paintings explore the paradoxes inherent to queer and trans representation. Bluestone destabilizes our sense of what is possible as we follow these figures through the many worlds they inhabit. We watch the subjects twist and contort in response to a distorted sense of self and in turn, they queer the spaces that they exist within. Bodies press up against their surroundings and jumble on top of one another – sometimes claustrophobic, sometimes erotic, we see them simultaneously liberated and stuck.
Rather than perpetuate an outdated paradigm of trying to help marginalized bodies blend into normative spaces, Bluestone exaggerates and celebrates their incongruity. The figures in the paintings test our bodies internal physical wisdom, creating collective transformation through their eroticism, flexibility and formal unreliability. Bluestone often refers to the power her paintings have to “cast spells” and call things into being. Crafted with joy and exuberance, these psychedelic scenes invite us into the dreams, visions and manifested realities of their focused creator. Between day and night; outside and inside; starlight and the glow of an LED screen, we are welcome to watch the subjects’ transformations and be transported and transformed alongside them.
It is worth noting that the paintings all feature real people from Bluestone’s own life who are transmuted as they perform in real and imagined spaces. The scenes are often infused with hyper-specific visual references to the real world. Some widely known (i.e. Tiger King, Killing Eve, Bernie Sanders campaign t-shirt, the Georgia Senate Runoff Election), some more intimate winks to friends or family (i.e. the view from the window of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, the 1986 World Series, Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid Book, Ericka Phillip’s dream of buying a southern plantation) and references to other painters and their paintings (Angela Dufresne, Scott Reeder, Elizabeth Murray, R.J. Messineo). The incomprehensibility of many of the forms/bodies/spaces in these paintings aren’t meant to intentionally elude the viewer, rather they flag themselves to those who’ve already nourished lives in these awkward spaces. Their incitation is private and public just like the multiplicity of our bodies in space.
Tony Bluestone (b. 1979, Englewood, New Jersey) received a BA from Bard College; an MFA from Hunter college; and has participated in residencies including The Shandaken Project, The Basil Alakazi Residency, DNA Residency, and The Prattsville Art Center Residency. She has had solo shows at Elaine L Jacob gallery at Wayne State University in Detroit, at Larrie Gallery, and a Two-Person Show at La Mama Gallery in New York City. She has had work in group shows at Rachel Uffner, Freight and Volume, the Academy of Arts and Letters, the New School, Etay Gallery, and Left Field Gallery, and has also performed written works at Storm King Art Center. In 2017, she was awarded the John Koch Award by the Academy of Arts and Letters. Bluestone is a teacher at Cooper Union and SUNY Purchase.
This project is made possible with funds from the Decentralization Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and administered in Greene County by the Greene County Council on the Arts dba CREATE Council for Resources to Enrich the Arts, Technology & Education.
*Please join us for an opening reception on Sunday, June 20th from 3-6pm. Masks will not be required for vaccinated guests at the opening. Food and refreshments will be served outside to keep numbers in the gallery down.