URI ARAN

Over the past decade, Uri Aran has developed a singular practice centred on an ongoing, philosophical inquiry into how our daily behaviours are used to create and assign meaning. Aran maintains a fluid relationship with material, connecting disparate subject matter through the familiar processes of everyday life–translation, mediation, and organisation. Working across sculpture, film, performance, drawing, and painting, Aran employs a distinct vernacular that defies traditional linguistic systems, using recurring elements to establish rhythmic relationships across his works. Objects and motifs, such as handwriting, personal photographs, studio detritus, drawings, and ephemera repeat across surfaces of Aran’s sculptures, which appear as compositional experiments, or workstations left in process. Suspended in time, these idiosyncratic elements work to conjure an imagined memory, while indications of their owner’s identity are left omitted, calling the narratives formed into question. This process highlights a tension between sentiment, and sentimentality, and reveals the larger, often invisible systems that trigger our emotive responses to the environments that surround us. Aran takes a similar approach within his video and performance works, as mnemonic devices, cinematic and theatrical tropes such as voiceover, typically used to develop comprehension, instead serve to continuously reorient the viewer. In keeping the work’s logic elastic, Aran emphasises the constant navigation of motives that shape our emotional responses–from those that are intuited to those that are learned.

These strategies carry over to Aran’s drawings and paintings, which are formed by layering opposing languages of marks, ranging from childlike to analytic, onto the same surface. Elements that appear to be quoted from an outside source, such as caricatures and anthropomorphised animals, are disrupted by improvisational marks and notational writing, causing repeated shifts in focus. In turn, the overall image sits at the brink of decipherability, leaving its individual parts still pliable. Seen as a whole, Aran’s practice revels in an interstitial space where contradictory elements and emotions are not opposed or disconnected, but instead share their own reality, as they often do in life.