zero point everything

Drawing, painting, sculpture, collage, moving image and photography collide and retreat from one another, establishing an orbit of recuring motifs. It could be argued, however, that the central medium of Aran’s practice is the exhibition itself, and its affective field as analogous to the page. The decisions Aran makes are akin to the rhythm, grammar, prosody and intonation of poetry. Physical points in space, like the structural arrangement of words on a page. Poetry is language’s excess. It is language that cannot be only reduced to information, it has the capacity to destabilise deeply entrenched ideas and forms, around which dominant positions, and values can otherwise take hold.

For Aran, the kind of knowledge that might be produced by art, so frequently cited as its core tenet of value, is not only found in the singular object or artwork itself, but also in the way their relation to one another can produce the discursive, emotional and social dynamics that enable a subjective response. Each component may be imbibed with an existing set of values and assumptions rooted in their function or historic/cultural context – a ‘La-Z-Boy’ armchair, tins of fish food, patterned porcelain, lace bows, floral print furnishings – but these values, whatever they infer, can be upturned and recoded through subtle manipulations in form and arrangement. Aran folds audiences into the field of relations, inscribing them into their own processes of knowledge production; their proximity, and relation to the works become just as erroneous, charged, infinite, contradictory, transitional and compassionate as the artists. This willful complexifying of the exhibition’s terms, is not designed to alienate the viewer with a sense of critical distance. There is sincerity and vulnerability in this gesture that evokes and activates shared and individual elementary feelings rather than a revelation of any specific truism.