Dana Hart-Stone: Backroads @ 650 California Street

Dana Hart-Stone's inspiration comes from wandering the vast, history-rich countryside of Eastern Montana as a child. Discovering evidence of personal narratives of Americans who settled the West, Hart-Stone found broken pottery, parched leather boots, ripped lace curtains, newspapers tacked onto walls, and rusty barbed wire from early Montana settlers. He became a cultural anthropologist, trying to piece together unknown narratives of the Western experience.

Today, Hart-Stone seeks grounding in authentic Western histories through found, vintage, American imagery, creating compositional paintings with vernacular photography. After choosing specific, content-rich snapshots, he scans the images, manipulates the forms, and places the images into filmstrips to suggest stories of life developing in the West. Each of Hart-Stone's unique finished paintings evoke a sense of place, remembrance, nostalgia, longing, and the passing of time. Family, friendship, transportation, architecture, community, and civic pride are themes that work to reveal the vast topography of the shared human experience.

Upon close examination of Hart-Stone’s imagery one is reminded of iconic Western movies, family photographs, magazines and black and white television series. Hart-Stone’s combination of the imagery within each painting takes on a pictorial dialogue. Through color, imagery and repetition each work is unified into a playful cohesive whole.

Educated in Montana and California, Dana Hart-Stone has exhibited his signature paintings extensively on the West Coast and throughout the Midwest, and has been honored with an Excellence in Teaching Award and an Honorable Mention at the Indiana Caucus for Art from the South Bend Regional Museum of Art. His work can be found in the collections of the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; and the Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, CA.

The exhibition is on view Monday-Friday between the hours of 9-5pm in the lobby of 650 California St., San Francisco, CA.