YveYANG is pleased to present Ghost Stone, Stephen Lichty’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and a site-specific project featuring three major works.

Stephen Lichty’s engagement with quartz began more than a decade ago when he first encountered an enigmatic boulder while briefly employed as a stone mason’s assistant in the Bay Area. He tracked the quartz boulder to its source, Liberty Hill Diggings, a defunct mine near the historic Gold-Rush-era community of Dutch Flat and surrounded by the Tahoe National Forest in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Mid-1800s small-scale panning operations in nearby rivers gave way to massive extraction through dynamite blasting and hydraulic mining. Before regulation, these practices caused environmental devastation, choking rivers with debris and toxic mercury, endangering agriculture, and leaving a scarred landscape marked by terraced pits where hillsides were washed away with high-powered water cannons. Without invasive techniques like these, the boulders that attracted Lichty’s attention would have remained buried in the earth. This site is a veritable emblem of irresponsible extraction and yet the surrounding area was established as a National Forest in the 1890s, shortly after hydraulic mining was banned. A dramatic landscape of sun-drenched granite peaks and crystalline alpine lakes make the Sierra Nevada, sometimes called the “Range of Light,” renowned for pristine natural beauty. This location, fraught with antagonistic contradiction, is the source of much of the raw material included in Lichty’s show Ghost Stone at YveYANG this spring.