There’s just one more week to see Pedro Gómez-Egaña’s “The Great Learning” at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. It’s a triumph of an exhibition that pushes sculpture into the realm of choreography and performance.
Gómez-Egaña has transformed the small gallery into something totally his own, creating surreal and immersive environments that capture skillfully the ways a sense of time has been fractured in our technology-dominated modern life. Our zeitgeist’s absurd constellation of 24/7 labor culture, algorithm-dominated feeds, broken supply chains and constant political spectacles are just some of the things the artist is thinking about and that he evokes so well.
At the exhibit’s entrance, a series of stop-motion animations set the stage with “Great Year,” mapping the moments the moon and the sun are visible in the sky above Cambridge throughout the exhibit’s 23-week run. In the second room, a massive, moving installation called “Virgo” takes up the space. It’s a domestic scene that Gómez-Egaña built and fractured into pieces by separating it with 28 walls; the furniture sits on platforms operated by gallery attendants, whom he calls “orchestrators.” The lamps and beds move slowly through cutouts specific to their shapes. Various incomplete scenes create the sense of an uneventful but mentally scattered day at home. An unmade bed hovers back and forth, an unlocked phone splayed onto the sheets; the walls move slowly past a toilet. A clock and a jar of pens repeats through multiple frames, resembling an infinity mirror. It’s a mesmerizing piece to walk through, with details jumping out from every angle.
The last room is entirely red, like a scene out of “Twin Peaks.” In the exhibit’s titular piece, “The Great Learning,” a large copper rod falls slowly toward the floor, balanced meticulously with 11 counterweights. In the corner, a gallery attendant inserts their hand into a piece of nightstand furniture to operate “Deep Rivers,” a piece embedded with a bellows-driven instrument. The movements of all these sculptures are achingly slow, meticulous yet open to spontaneous interventions from the orchestrators – pushing them into the realm of choreography or even performance art.
Gómez-Egaña was trained as a musician before pivoting into visual art, and it shows. He refers to several avant-garde composers in his work, but you don’t need to catch those to appreciate his whip-smart contemplations on time and modern life.
The artist succeeds in tackling big ideas with exquisitely engineered sculptures, creating a show that feels intellectually challenging yet unpretentious. In a world that’s flooded with “immersive” Van Gogh experiences, AI-generated video and other bad faith bids for our attention, an exhibit with an ambitious concept that fully delivers should not be taken for granted.
“Pedro Gómez-Egaña: The Great Learning” is at the List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames St., Kendall Square, Cambridge, through Sunday.
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