Grant Stoops. Crone and Friends

About

The exhibition will focus on a series of paintings depicting a world of distorted, melted and disordered human creatures. Before becoming a painting, miniature sculptural forms are created in wax-based clay and are arranged in several positions under a variety of lighting sources, photographed, and then digitally composed into a diorama-like space. The basis for the paintings are the digital files as well as the original sculptures. The translation across many mediums is intended to erode all obvious reference to reality while rendering an alternate world in high detail.

Stoops’ work inverts the relationship between scale and importance, transforming the material vagaries of sculpture and expressionistic painting to intentionality. As examples of this, fingerprints in clay become the striations of muscles in the large figure of the Clowny Guy, and sprayed foam insulation works as an intestinal landscape in Dyson Sphere Endoscopy.