iMIT List Visual Arts CenterKendall Square, Cambridge
Uri Aran's work is at once deeply idiosyncratic and oddly familiar: to follow it is to tinker alongside the artist, to be let in on an invention, or perhaps a shorthand between friends.
תצוגה מקדימה: נכתב לפני פתיחת התערוכה
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.
The googly-eye earthwork
Look for a mass of piled-up googly eyes, the craft-drawer kind, heaped to the scale of a land-art earthwork.
The annotated panels
Panels covered in annotations that hover between a quick line drawing and a painting.
The welded sculptures
Welded metal sculptures that, in the List's words, pose like equations.
The plasticene and foam forms
Bulbous shapes the artist worked by hand in plasticene and foam.