Uri Aran: House

Upon entering House, we traverse a foyer-like hallway, in which sit a row of faintly buzzing overhead projectors casting odd and familiar images on the opposite wall. As we walk between the line of antiquated, slightly funny machines and their pictures, we hear the muffled sound of music emanating from another room, and feel ourselves welcomed and a little altered, as though we’ve undergone a comic rite of passage. We are conscious of having gone from one state to another, from outside to within, a feeling that colors our encounters with the exhibition’s sculptures, paintings, and films––works whose utter unpretentiousness belie the material meticulousness with which they have been composed and built. In this show, and in all Aran’s work, playfulness and drama, nostalgia and wit, awkwardness and finesse all comfortably cohabitate.

A number of paintings in the show suggest architecture; what stage of the architectural process, however, is uncertain: they waver between blueprint, building site, and finished space. Such is typical of Aran’s artworks, which repeatedly unravel and reform themselves in front of our eyes, their component bits going from arrays of discreet things to unified wholes and back again. We see this in a series of videos that, hung high up like church windows, bounce and flicker between subjects and tones, playing with abstraction and legibility. A glimpse of a work’s totality may last just a second before it shatters, only to re-present itself anew moments later. Like musical compositions that oscillate between harmony and dissonance, they are temporal in nature, impossible to absorb with a single look. Examined together, we notice that several of the works appear to portray the same built space. This “building” repeats like a character in a cartoon strip, becoming, in the process, familiar, even a bit anthropomorphic - as do their other component parts—from steaks of graphite and oil to still-lifes of flowers.

In these paintings, swaths of raw, negative space offset the carefully worked constructions, suggesting interior and exterior, home and not-home. The frame of architecture, and more specifically of the house, provides the show a central, animating question: what belongs inside? An intimacy underlies the artist’s repeated use of motifs; an established visual vernacular of images, phrases, and objects repeat across various media––like a private language of jokes and references, the kind shared between lovers, now made public.The exhibition also mimics the division of space in a home, in which each room has its functional role, but also its emotional one: what kinds of conversations do we have in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in the living room?

A sense of childhood permeates the exhibition. From the title, we might imagine that the artworks are themselves like kids “playing house.” The show has the sincerity and imperfection of a children’s performance; we are convinced not by the flawlessness of an artifice, but by the emotion and humor which emerges from the cracks and seams. The artist embodies both the children, acting and singing and dancing and laughing—and the adult—directing the show, half-obscured by the curtain but always just visible, gently choreographing meanings and tones.

The artworks in House speak in seemingly dissonant tones. A wall sculpture features a creeping line of passport-sized photos, packets of fish food, a disassembled piece of mass-produced wall décor, and a pair of 1970’s-era kitsch statuettes (in another sculpture): the effect is simultaneously cute and abject, the component bits not quite recognizable yet overly familiar.

Unlike past exhibitions, House contains no spoken language. In that absence, the soundtrack, supplied by a video in the interior-most gallery space, is musical: piano jazz, expert but labored, exploratory—a professional practicing a new piece. The sound has an innocently voyeuristic quality: intimate but distant, overlaid with layers of room tone. It ends abruptly, giving way to orchestral Baroque music. The first piece of audio was overheard and recorded on a Zoom call between the artist and his brother, then added to his computer’s music library, where it ended up next to the Vivaldi oratorio. Typical of Aran’s practice, the juxtaposition is less accident than discovery: like found poetry, such moments are the result of a carefully-tuned sensibility and constant searching.

—Tommy Brewer