Brooklyn-based artist Tara Donovan reimagines and elevates everyday, mass-manufactured materials into the realm of fine art. In her sculptures and large-scale installations, she employs a range of objects—disposable Styrofoam cups, index cards, paper plates, pencils, pins, rubber bands, straws, tar paper, and even toothpicks—transforming their physical properties and functions. While some of her works are inspired by abstraction and the pure geometry of the grid, others conjure up the sublime, evoking geological phenomena, biomorphic shapes, and organic, cellular forms.

Monumental in scale, this untitled work is composed of tens of thousands of acrylic rods meticulously joined together to form a composite sculpture. Here, the artist explores the additive effects of “accumulating identical objects,” or aggregations, in which she layers and combines materials together to complicate visual distinctions between part and whole. The final work inhabits the gallery with an almost animate presence, calling to mind a mineral or petrified plant.

Known for her experimentation with materials and her rigorous, labor-intensive process, Donovan is something of an alchemist. She transforms the mundane and familiar into the strange and otherworldly, even as her works approximate things found in the natural world. Blurring the lines between art and science, this installation embodies Donovan’s restless creativity and ingenuity, and indeed the process of metamorphosis itself.

Tara Donovan (American, b. 1969)
Untitled, 2014
Acrylic and adhesive
Courtesy of the Artist and Pace Gallery
Photo: Kerry Ryan McFate, courtesy Pace Gallery