New York, NY — My Pet Ram presents Favorite Stone, a show of new paintings by Sophie Grant and sculptures by Simone Kearney. The show will run from January 23rd until February 14th, 2026. Please join us for the reception on Friday, January 23rd from 6-9pm.

The show’s title is in conversation with the Surrealist French poet Andre Breton’s essay, “The Language of Stones,” when he writes: “I’ve often thought those (stones) that, during a group search, assign themselves, by their qualities of substance or structure, to each individual’s attention, are those that offer the maximum affinity to their particular constitution. It seems certain to me that, on the same walk, two beings, unless they resemble each other in some strange sense, could not possibly pick up the same stones, so true is it that we find only what meets a deep need, even if such a need could solely be satisfied in a completely symbolic way.” Breton proposes a relationship to the material world that is full of intimacy and revelation. A stone might resonate with us. Or we might gravitate to one stone as opposed to another, like we might to a particular person in a crowd. They speak to us, for some reason. And stones speak to us – or at least they do for those who want to listen. They show us something about ourselves, and tell us about that which is timeless and beyond us.

Grant and Kearney – themselves old friends – both share a love of stones. Cultivating a practice in receptivity and a responsiveness to materiality, each conjures forms or images that move between the legible and the less definable. In Grant’s paintings here on display in the gallery, silhouettes – sometimes rife with striations that recall marble and other stone forms – play upon the ever-lively surfaces of her canvases. Looking at her paintings, one feels as though a world of myriad things have left their mark on the canvas before departing, or perhaps these marks are incipient, and it’s the shape of what’s to come, somewhere between memory and intuition.

Alongside Grant’s paintings, Kearney has installed ten hand-carved stone sculptures, half of which are displayed on pressed earth blocks and pine pedestals, the other half on shelves. Here, the “hand” is the central recurring motif for the sculptures. Each object, arranged in a line, functions as a unit, like words in a sentence, falling somewhere between rune and cartoon, hieroglyph and found fragment or earth-bit. Relationships between forms are found through mild resonance or repetition, but nothing is certain or solidified.

Together, Grant and Kearney’s imaginations are at work to draw out form from formlessness. What arises out of more nameless matters? What emerges from their explorations starts to have a good banter.   

The gallery is located at 48 Hester Street on the Lower East Side. Gallery hours are Thursday–Sunday, 12–6 PM, and by appointment. For more information, please contact info@mypetram.com.