Elizabeth Stone makes artwork for YAM out of photo negatives

Except that’s not quite true. Any great artist will tell you that the completed product is only part of the artwork. The finished photo is only as important as the film, which is only as important as the developing chemicals, which is only as important as the camera, which is only as important as the image you’re capturing. You can extrapolate down as much as you’d like.

Now Stone is literalizing that idea. The artist, who lives in northwest Montana near Seeley Lake, has shot photos her whole life. But in 2019, she started to work with film in an entirely different way.

“I wanted to do something different with my work,” she remembered. So she took some film negatives that she’d shot and stitched them together into a sort of sculpture.

“That got me thinking about the negative and the positive in a really different way,” Stone said.

These sculptures are moldable and adaptable. They can be displayed flat, like a giant film blanket, or wrapped around each other and woven into helixes.

“I’m still working with analog materials,” Stone described. “So I’m staying in the family. I’m just working more dimensionally with photographic materials.”

What Stone’s work does is recontextualize what a film negative is. Removed of context and abstracted, you can see them as tangible pieces of memory, capturing and preserving moments in amber and sepia tones.

That’s the idea behind Stone’s “I Remember” project, which is an ongoing “community-based collaborative artwork” she’s working on with the Yellowstone Art Museum, as part of the museum’s ongoing celebrations for its 60th anniversary.

It’s a fitting tribute, because “I Remember” isn’t just meant to feature work from Stone. Instead, she’s asking for donations of photo negatives and film slides, which will then be used as raw material for the finished piece, which will be installed at the YAM in October. There are nine drop-off locations throughout Billings.

“Everything will be accepted, and we’ll make something,” Stone said.

Anybody old enough to not have a TikTok account probably still has boxes of old negatives sitting around their house. Without costly, cumbersome and rare projectors, the pieces lose their purpose and meaning. Here’s a chance to let them be something else, to put them back to work years (maybe decades) after you picked up your first digital camera.

And there’s an added perk. When you donate, Stone and the YAM are asking for a little information about the photos, to attempt to put them in context. In return, the museum will scan your film and give you the digital files, turning them from something outdated to an image you can pull up on your phone.

“You want to get rid of the stuff, and we’ll give you some digital markers,” Stone said.

She’s done this sort of project before. The YAM installation is her seventh site-specific piece. Stone similarly asked for donations at a gallery in North Carolina and got 9,000 pieces from about 250 people. Someone even donated a collection of glass plate negatives. She’s expecting a similar response in Billings.

And even if you’re not old enough to have shot pictures on a traditional film camera, you can still participate in “I Remember.” Stone will be returning to town throughout the summer to host public sewing sessions where anyone can drop in and help her knit the negatives together. The first one will be next weekend on Saturday, May 3, from 4-6 p.m. at the museum.

“Anybody who wants to participate can sit around the table like an old fashioned sewing bee,” Stone described.

The whole spirit of “I Remember” is collaboration, so it’s fitting that this project is happening at the YAM, especially during this big year, due to happenstance. Stone met YAM Executive Director Jessica Ruhle five years ago when the artist was at a residency in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and the director was working at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

That was in 2019, when Stone was first experimenting with working dimensionally with film, and exploring the idea of doing artwork that could get communities involved. People are almost always more excited about art when they had a hand in making it.

Stone still isn’t sure what the finished “I Remember” installation will look like. And she won’t be until she’s ready to build it this fall. This work is entirely dependent on both the materials she uses and the space in which she’ll use them.

“Jessica and her team have given me free reign,” she said. “Let’s see what we get for donations and then then make what we want to make.”

One thing is for certain. Once it’s done, “I Remember” will enter the YAM’s permanent collection. So Stone wants to make sure it’s a good representation of Billings.

“I’ve been doing a bunch of research here,” she said. “How Billings started, how it’s grown. That will definitely influence what the piece winds up looking like.”