Uri Aran: Look How Hard They Work

Preview: written before the show opened

In the Hayden Gallery sits a heap of googly eyes, the stick-on kind from a craft drawer, piled to what the List calls the scale of an earthwork. The museum's own description: the most elementary form of animation, "tragicomically" enlarged.

Around it hangs a new body of work, Aran's first major institutional solo show in the US: panels that sit between quick line drawing and painting, welded sculptures that pose like equations, and bulbous forms worked by hand in plasticene and foam. He builds from doodles, passport photos and kitschy keepsakes, repeating and misaligning them until they read like characters, and calls the result "sentimental despite myself."

You walk in to someone else's private shorthand and pick it up as you go. A show called Look How Hard They Work, on a campus that runs on 2am problem sets, needs no wall text. Entry is free, the opening reception is 22 October from 6 to 8pm, and the List stays open until 7pm on Wednesdays and Thursdays.