Will Stovall, Clock Watchers, 2026 (detail). Acrylic and watercolor on canvas, with aluminum frame. 39 × 33 ½ in (99 × 85 cm). Courtesy the artist. Photo: Vivian Marie Doering
List Projects 36: Will Stovall
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Will Stovall’s new paintings on canvas and machined aluminum explore machina mundi: a metaphor from antiquity that, by the seventeenth century, came to describe the world as a mechanical clock, governed by underlying technological and scientific systems that, while open to measurement and modeling, cannot be experienced in full.
Many of Stovall’s works depict figures moving through densely built cities full of gears, trams, and mysterious devices. One kinetic piece, Tower (2026), applies the clockwork metaphor to the painting’s substrate, as three nested aluminum columns, each with a painted surface, rotate at different speeds when cranked from below, returning to their original alignment only after roughly forty hours of continuous turning. Across the exhibition, mechanisms, in both imagery and form, engage philosophical questions about social time, civic order, and the boundary between human action and programmed motion.
List Projects 36: Will Stovall is organized by Marina Caron, Assistant Curator.
Will Stovall (b. 1983, Washington D.C.) is an artist based in Washington D.C. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Galerie Drei, Cologne (2026); Château Shatto, Los Angeles (2025); and Ulrik, New York (2024). He teaches painting at George Washington University and holds an MFA from Bard College (2025) and a Ph.D in Germanic Languages and Literature from Yale University (2018).