URI ARAN AT THE DOUGLAS HYDE GALLERY

The Douglas Hyde is delighted to present the first institutional exhibition in Ireland by artist Uri Aran.

Aran has a decidedly unfixed relationship to media, combining aspects of sculpture, video, painting, drawing, and installation, challenging the traditional formal constraints of each. His work explores the humour, poetics and manipulations of everyday objects and popularly held beliefs. Aran tries to call attention to the nuances within a world of givens. His visual language ranges from text and elaborately developed films to the assembly of familiar everyday objects, which he processes, combines and therefore unites to create ensembles that hover over the boundary of the familiar and the unexpected. Seen together Aran’s work can be intimate and disconcerting at the same time resulting in encounters that are simultaneously playful and deeply sombre.

Aran’s unique practice interrogates and redefines structures and models of communication, interpersonal relationships, and the material world. Through his work, Aran examines the basics of language, behavior, perception, and the rules and conditions of social interactions. This examination evolves around the use of familiar objects, signs, forms, images and gestures, which he relates to one another by superimposing a multitude of temporal axes, linguistic structures, and material categories. Throughout his practice, Aran constructs a language of indeterminate signifiers in an ongoing pursuit of graphic and linguistic systems, and the pushing of these systems to the point of disintegration. “The discord of meaning in language is something I’m interested in”, he has explained. “I don’t know if it’s because English is not my mother tongue; I see a delay of meaning. I see things as mediated—almost everything is quoted.” As a result, new contexts of meaning emerge, reconstructing, extending, manipulating and subverting existing genres and hierarchies.

The exhibition at The Douglas Hyde has been developed over the past two years and brings together previous works, as well as works, produced responding to the gallery space.