Tara Donovan, Untitled (Mylar), 2008, Photo: Dennis Cowley. |
Tara Donovan, Creating Otherworldly Landscapes with Mass Quantities |
Tara Donovan, Moiré, Rolls of adding machine tape, Photo: © Tara Donovan, Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York.
Tara Donovan, Untitled (Paper Plates, Glue), 2003, Photo: © Tara Donovan, Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York.
Tara Donovan, Installation view from Tara Donovan at Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004, Photo: © Tara Donovan, Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York.
Tara Donovan, Colony, 2005, Photo Ellen Labenski, Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York. |
Institute of Contemporary Art The first museum survey of American sculptor Tara Donovan opens this fall at The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Featuring 17 sculptures and installations from the past decade—including a new work commissioned by the ICA — Tara Donovan traces the ambitious process of this ingenious young artist. With acute awareness of the aesthetic properties of her materials, Donovan explores how mass quantities of everyday items — tape, plastic cups, toothpicks, buttons —can transcend the familiar to create stunning, almost otherworldly, sculptural forms. "This groundbreaking exhibition of Tara Donovan's sculpture is a timely opportunity to experience Donovan's evolution as an artist and bring needed scholarship to her artistic practice," says Jill Medvedow, Director of The Institute of Contemporary Art. "Donovan has an exceptional understanding of how individual items can confound and astound when configured en masse," according to the ICA's Nicholas Baume and Jen Mergel, co-curators of the exhibition. "She installs her configurations with great sensitivity to the fusion between material, light and architecture, achieving effects that approach the sublime." Mirroring nature's own process, Donovan arranges simple parts into complex wholes-evoking endless possibilities of reproduction and growth. Nebulous — a 20-foot installation formed from thousands of looped rounds of Scotch tape — appears like a soft mist emerging from the gallery floor. Highly attuned to the aesthetic potential of her material, Donovan draws our attention to the subtle purple hue that emerges when light moves upon the airy, irregular form, creating interwoven patches of translucency and color within the installation. In Haze, Donovan stacks millions of clear drinking straws against the full length of a gallery wall in what resembles a hazy blur or rolling fog bank. The straws appear as a solid atmospheric plane as light filters through the holes of each tiny plastic tube. Framed only by the walls that surround it, the work suggests boundless possibilities for the sculptural form. From toothpick cubes to Mylar constellations, Donovan's abstractions combine contradictory properties in commonplace materials — the manufactured and the natural, the familiar and the otherworldly — to unexpected effect. As artist Chuck Close was recently quoted in Vogue as saying, "[Tara's] material never stops being what it is, and yet it builds into an amazing apparition." Born in 1969 in New York, NY, Tara Donovan has had solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (2007), the Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO (2006), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA (2004), amongst others. Her work was featured in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and she was the recipient of the Alexander Calder Foundation's first annual Calder Prize in 2005. Donovan received her MFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA (1999). She lives and works in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Following the ICA, Tara Donovan travels to the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati (Feb. 7-May 11, 2009), the Des Moines Arts Center (June 19-Sept. 13, 2009) and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (Oct. 10, 2009-Jan. 16, 2010). The ICA exhibition coincides with the publication of Tara Donovan, a comprehensive 160-page monograph co-published by The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and The Monacelli Press/Random House, New York. Contents include an introductory essay by ICA associate curator Jen Mergel and ICA chief curator Nicholas Baume; a conversation between Tara Donovan and Lawrence Weschler; an afterword by ICA director Jill Medvedow, and approximately 70 reproductions of all Donovan's works to date. |
Tara Donovan, Untitled (Styrofoam Cups), 2008, Photo: © Tara Donovan, Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York. |
