Pierogi is pleased to present an exhibition of recent work by John Stoney, The Origins of Grey. This exhibition consists of three related groups of work including photography, sculpture, and drawing. In this new body of work Stoney continues an examination of humankind’s place (and his individual place) within the environment and the larger scheme of things—geologically, historically, and otherwise—where it is put in its place within the vastness of time and space.

A series of three sculptures, entitled The Origins of Grey (Gems I, Gems II, and Minerals), are, borrowing a term from photography, de-saturated reproductions of the ecstatically colorful displays of gemstones and minerals at the American Museum of Natural History's Morgan Memorial Hall of Gems. The gems and minerals are reproduced in the irreducible greys of eleven different pure metallic elements—including elemental aluminum, antimony, bismuth, cadmium, indium, iron, lead, nickel, silver, tin, zinc—in configurations identical to the original specimen displays.

Conversely, Perspectives on Landscape Photography are a series of full color reproductions of black and white gelatin silver photographs of the American Northeast and the Rocky Mountains. The original anonymous, small-scale gelatin silver prints were found by Stoney, scanned and printed in full color, revealing smudges and tints of color imbued to the originals over time.

The largest sculpture, It's All Good, is a gilded bronze globe prominently displaying the earth's tectonic plates. Internal mechanisms placed along the plate boundaries strike with corresponding force and location coincident with real-time information from the USGS earthquake data set. Since the tectonic plates are continually moving at the rate of 5 to 10 cm per year, the incidence of earthquakes globally is nearly constant at several earthquakes per hour. The clanging of the globe serves as a constant reminder of geological processes of a discomforting geographical and temporal scale.

This will be John Stoney’s third exhibition with Pierogi. Stoney's work has been exhibited widely and was included in “Lives of the Hudson” at the Tang Museum (Saraotga Springs, NY), as well as presented at Socrates Sculpture Park, Art in General, among others. He studied at Central School of Art, St. Martins School in London, England and received his M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. He currently teaches at The University of Texas at Austin and splits his time between Austin, TX and Brooklyn, NY.