Central to Take This Dog for Example, is the sculptural work Bread Library (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, 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. The “dog” in the exhibition’s title, and appearing throughout the exhibition, is a recurring device in his work. As Aran 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.

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 (without his Bert) to study desks, from blackboards to slide projectors and projection stands, alongside a library composed of bread letters. These ensembles are familiar and disconcerting at the same time, resulting in encounters that are simultaneously playful and deeply sombre.

Whether, film, painting, drawing or installation, Aran’s work explores the humour, poetics and manipulations of everyday objects and popularly held beliefs. He calls attention to the nuances within a world of givens.  Rather than mediating our perception of meaning, he opens things up, allowing language to breathe, to bleed; the pictorial becomes material becomes linguistic, and then cycles back again.

Uri Aran lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited extensively, with recent solo exhibitions including: House, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, 2020, Tenants Like These, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2019, Mice, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 2016, Two Things About Suffering, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2016, Sensitivo, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 2014, Puddles, Peep-Hole, Milan, 2014, Five Minutes Before, South London Gallery, London, 2013, here, here and here, Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich, 2013, among others. Aran’s work has also appeared in international exhibitions including the Liverpool Biennial (2014), Whitney Biennial (2014) and Venice Biennale (2011 and 2013).

Image: Uri Aran, Good Route, 2020, Metal, wood, ceramics, oil clay, paper, wax, bronze, leaf and mixed media, 63.5 x 81.3 x 19.1 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Special thanks to mother’s tankstation Dublin | London, Sadie Coles HQ, London, and Andrew Kreps, New York, for their support of the exhibition along with the Irish Museum of Modern Art for their production residency, in particular Janice Hough. Thank you to Trinity Arts Workshop for their assistance in the production of new ceramics and to Al’s Bakery, Terenure.