Central to Take This Dog for Example, is the sculptural work Bread Library (2020 – 2023), which reproduces the Latin alphabet in bread letters. This expansive work invades the senses as visitors descend into the gallery space and brings forth ideas of bread as a vehicle for the transference of memory and knowledge, and the foundation of language. Untitled (2020 – 2023), another ongoing work, uses unique cast bronze forms to create sentence-like compositions across the gallery walls. Bronze, a material often associated with authority’s permanence, here becomes fluid.

While the “dog” in the exhibition’s title, and appearing throughout the exhibition, is a recurring device in Aran’s work. As he states “animals function as an icon of sentimentality, vessels for the full spectrum of human emotion through the projection of language onto them, they’re blameless…located in an idolized primordial domain from the perspective of society.”

Throughout his practice, Aran constructs a language of indeterminate signifiers in an ongoing pursuit of graphic and linguistic systems, pushing 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. He suggests that an object or word’s legibility is not inherent, but rather conditional: its comprehensibility reliant on context.

This exploration evolves around the use of familiar objects, signs, forms, images and gestures, which he relates to one another by superimposing a multitude of linguistic structures, material categories and temporal axes. In the exhibition at The Douglas Hyde, located on the campus of Trinity College Dublin, materials and the language of learning trace through multi-faceted works, from Sesame Street’s Ernie to study desks, from blackboards to slide projectors. These ensembles are familiar and disconcerting at the same time, resulting in encounters that are simultaneously playful and deeply sombre.