Tara Donovan. Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Tara Donovan, "Untitled (Mylar)," 2007. Photo credit: Stephen White, Courtesy of Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

October 10, 2008 - January 4, 2009

By Raisa Clavijo

Sculptor Tara Donovan’s recent exhibition at the ICA/Boston, without question, represents an example of talent and sensitivity. Through works which summarize the evolution of her work over the last decade, visitors are invited to discover this artist’s creative process. Donovan works with everyday objects and materials, assembling large volumes of them, capriciously placing them in the space; thus achieving minimalist sculptures of singular beauty.

Endowed with a special gift for perceiving the aesthetic qualities of what might be  considered “ordinary,” Donovan uses toothpicks, buttons, strips of Scotch tape, Mylar, drinking straws, paper plates, plastic and Styrofoam cups to create pieces in which she combines apparently contradictory properties: the manufactured and the natural, the familiar and the strange. Her materials do not abandon their original shape; instead, upon being combined, they create increasingly novel structures.

Traversing the halls at ICA, we discover an amalgam of fabulous installations. Among them, of note is a kind of sidereal landscape containing large spheres made out of small Mylar fragments. Another truly beautiful piece is one which appears to be a strange biomorphic creature suspended from the ceiling, but which is, in reality, made out of huge quantities of Styrofoam cups. Worthy of special mention is “Nebulous” (2002), an installation comprised of millions of strips of Scotch tape. The result is an exhibition hall floor which appears covered by frost or dense mist.

Perhaps one of her most ingenious sculptures is a perfect cube comprised of millions of toothpicks. As in many other cases, the piece comes from her meticulous observation of everyday life. In the catalogue, the exhibition’s curators, Nicholas Baume and Jen Mergel, recount how the artist observed that toothpicks contained in a box were arranged in such a way that they perfectly reproduced the right angles of their container. That is how the idea arose to create an enormous cube by assembling large quantities of these simple objects.

Each of Donovan’s pieces produces a powerful experience, which in turn spurs us to take a fresh look at the world around us. Her oeuvre reveals the infinite possibilities of fusing materials, light and space in order to achieve a truly sublime effect.