Pedro Gómez-Egaña’s Installations Reject Attention-Fracking

How do we experience the interdependence of space and time? Pedro Gómez-Egaña takes up this question in his first US solo show with a rare combination of gravity and a light touch. On view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, ‘The Great Learning’ probes the temporal architecture of daily life, with the artist drawing on his background in music composition, sculpture, installation and performance. The breadth of his interests is matched only by the size of his library, but familiarity with the texts he cites is not essential for visitors. As one exclaimed upon exiting the show: ‘In each room I was transformed, without even having to think about it.’ It’s the experience – engaged, constructive – as much as the content of reading and listening that is Gómez-Egaña’s focus.

The dance of the sun and the moon over the List Center is the subject of Great Year (2025), a silent cutout animation that fills the entryway’s back wall, connecting the space with the heavens. In this site-specific grid of projector light and dappled shadow, circles at various scales traverse 23 calendar squares, one for each week of the show; small black dots delineate solar and lunar orbits. A soft, translucent grey lifts and lowers like a curtain, indicating the amount of light when the sun and moon appear in the sky together that week.

Daylight plays a more affecting role in Virgo (2022), a vast installation of dramatically bisected domestic interiors. There is no roof over the mise-en-scène: every eight minutes 12 ceiling lamps switch on, one by one, simulating the arc of the sun. Taking its cue from the Parthenon – famous for the illusion of height created by the central swelling of its 46 columns – Virgo’s ‘aspirational’ apartment, as Gómez-Egaña calls it, appears as many times in as many configurations as a mail-order catalogue. The ‘Orchestrator’ (a gallery attendant) pushes one of two metal frames the length of the set-like structure, pulling a lamp and rubbery houseplant through the 28 tightly packed, custom-carved walls. Olivier Messiaen’s 1941 ‘Quatuor pour la fin du temps’ (Quartet for the End of Time) plays on a laptop. Time and space are compressed in Virgo. As visitors navigate around the installation’s sides or along a central corridor, their movements give rise to uncanny perspectives: an accordion-like configuration of wall clocks; the exposed back of a generic still-life painting, its own trompe-l’oeil.

A further inversion occurs with the final room. Visitors are invited to sit on boxy red benches like pedestals around a wall painted red almost to the ceiling. There hangs The Great Learning (2025), a copper rod strung like an instrument with metal threads, which falls to the carmine carpet over the course of a carefully calibrated hour or so, calling to mind the fate – as the artist said during a walkthrough – of so many monuments. The balance of monumentality and mundanity continues in the layered ambient and instrumental soundscape of Cordillera (2025), which means both ‘mountain range’ and ‘string’ in Spanish. Meanwhile, the three metal pendulums that comprise The Ask (2025) recall orreries – and the celestial model we started with – as they knock on the gallery’s red walls, leaving sooty black drawings, akin to shadows, at the spots they repeatedly hit.

Gallerygoers seemed inspired to linger and wander – the rooms, their minds, maybe even the cosmos itself. My own thoughts wandered to science historian D. Graham Burnett’s writings on ‘attention fracking’: the notion that a principal focus of capitalism today is to mine our already depleted reserves of attention. Layered and surprising, Gómez-Egaña’s hybrid installation and performance work offers a uniquely embodied, experiential alternative.

Pedro Gómez-Egaña’s ‘The Great Learning’ is on view at MIT List Visual Arts Center until 27 July

^{Main image: Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Virgo, 2022, installation with wood and metal panels, metal frames, interior furnishings, video, sound, at the 2022 Biennale de Lyon. Courtesy: the artist and MIT List Visual Arts Center; photograph: Blaise Adilon}