A number of years ago, Chicago artist Michelle Stone assembled a mass of her signature paint sculptures into a dense, creeping garden. In it, acryl- ic paint and modeling paste covers everything, the palette of vivid greens imbuing the installation with an aura of viscous, oozing life. Today, Stone is working on another garden, and unlike the lush version of the recent past, this new garden is bare and gray. Life and death, light and dark Ðthe em- phasis shifts on a linear spectrum of the dichotomies ever present in StoneÕs practice, and is re ective of the changes the artist gleans from the world around us, as well as her brazenly personal expression.