Cambridge, Massachusetts
It’s all too common to find exhibitions that raise expectations about their featured artworks and how they operate. More often than not though, this feels like a setup for disappointment or argument when the works fail to deliver on bold assertions. But with “The Great Learning” (on view through July 27, 2025), a presentation of six large-scale works in three galleries, Pedro Gómez-Egaña makes good on his intentions to explore the “polyrhythmic experiences of time” and “our capacity for apperception.”
The show opens with Great Year (2025), a silent, 12-minute, stop-motion video made of 23 square frames projected on the wall in a recognizable calendar format. Each static frame contains a sphere, which, in turn, contains two dots that chase each other around while a thin veil lifts and lowers. Seen together, the movements are asynchronous, and the effect is a little like standing behind 23 blinking eyes. The traveling dots mark the paths of the sun and the moon over Cambridge for the duration of the exhibition. It’s scientific yet playful and sets the stage for Gómez-Egaña’s world-within-a-world approach.
Virgo (2022), the central and most provocative work in “The Great Learning,” pays homage to Gordon Matta-Clark’s building cuts, but with a difference. Where Matta-Clark sought to reveal untapped potential, Gómez-Egaña instead explores our moment of too much potential. Virgo consists of a set-like, domestic interior cut apart by 28 partial, open-ended walls. Viewers can walk around the entire piece and then move through a bisecting passage, gaining semi-obstructed views into a mise-en-abyme where each “cell” of the structure contains an embedded scenario—a video of starlings in flight, for instance, or a laptop navigating a map of the Richat Structure in the Sahara Desert while self-generating a list/poem. Books and puzzles offer additional interpretive moments. Then the walls move, and it all changes. Each half of the structure contains a glass pocket door that museum attendants pull out and push in as they see fit, taking severed parts of the interior through the installation and out into the larger space. This is the update on Matta-Clark for our moment. Fifty-plus years ago, the question was: “What might be possible?” Now we know that everything is all too possible, everywhere, around the clock. In that endless possibility lies rupture, the instability of too much. Gómez-Egaña’s effect is vertiginous: the halved bed, the cleaved chair, the laptop, iPhone, side table, toilet, and books all pull away while other anchoring features remain static. The line of sight changes unexpectedly. We can follow it, but to re-establish the original requires time and memory. It’s eerie but recognizable, as unnerving to feel as it is delightful to witness.
Gómez-Egaña trained as a musician and composer before turning to visual art. That training comes through in all of the works here but is most prominent in three individual pieces installed together in one large, crimson-red gallery (accompanied by the sound work Cordillera). The Great Learning (2025) is a temporal sculpture featuring an oversize copper rod elaborately counterweighted to permit its slow descent to the floor. Over the course of the day, the rod slowly falls, the adjacent weights rise, and the gallery attendants reset the piece to begin again. Temperature, humidity, and gravity all impact the rate of the rod’s movement. In this work (and in the exhibition title), Gómez-Egaña acknowledges British composer Cornelius Cardew and his work with a Fluxus-inspired ensemble of non-musicians known as The Scratch Orchestra. Their 1971 piece “The Great Learning” borrowed its title from a text by Confucius that reflects on collectivism.
The Ask (2025) is a simple yet mesmeric gestural work. Through gravity and hidden electromagnetic triggers, three pendulums are irregularly pulled toward the wall and held briefly at different intervals before being released to swing back out into the room. Each keeps its own pace, which can also be disturbed by the gallery attendants. In the adjacent Deep Rivers (2025), a tilted, nightstand-like piece of furniture embedded in the wall seating hides two bellows-driven instruments that hum and lull, falling in and out of sync with the gently knocking spheres. These are worlds whose forces create an unpredictable rhythm, but it is a rhythm all the same.
