Tara Donovan: When Quotidian becomes Extraordinary
By Irina Sheynfeld
January 31, 2021
Tara Donovan’s new show Intermediaries is now on display at Pace Gallery in New York. Donovan is a New York-based artist who creates wonders from humble everyday materials. Her installations are often monumental in size and scope and overpower viewers with their sublime beauty and scale. In the interview with Lauren Christensen from The New York Times, Donovan said:
“With every project, I isolate a new material and have to figure it all out from the beginning. I’m always looking for certain physical traits that can somehow be activated outside of the material itself. Transparency and reflectivity are important because those traits respond to light, and they can be amplified or subdued according to the conditions in the space. A single drinking straw has a very clear purpose that’s universal, but a million straws — together they become something else entirely. They take on ethereal and atmospheric qualities that aren’t present when you’re just observing a single straw.”[1]
Installation view of the exhibition Intermediaries at Pace, Photo credit © Irina Sheynfeld, 2021
Donovan’s work is otherworldly. With the large installations created from everyday humble materials such as straws, plastic cups, fluted paper plates, acrylic rods, unsharpened pencils, and even toothpicks, the artist is searching for the meaning and questioning our perception of the world around us. The works can’t help but bring our attention to the plastic pollution crisis. The viewers are bound to ask, what is this wonder substance, so ubiquitous as to become invisible, that humanity brought forth? Where are those islands of plastic waste? Most of us have never seen them – like icebergs that exist only in our collective imagination. Donovan’s works bring the beauty and the tragedy of humanity’s relationship with plastic into focus.
During a panel discussion organized by Pace gallery, Jenni Sorkin, an art historian best known for her interest in feminist artists who are working with non-traditional mediums, describes Donovan as the gardener of the materials. Sorkin argued that it is important to see the artist’s work in-person to appreciate its full dimensionality, to walk around her installations in order to fully experience the subtle changes of color and the play of light and shadow. Sorkin argues in her chapter “Infinite Modularity” in Tara Donovan: Fieldwork, “A gardener of the absolutely artificial, Donovan seeds doubt, leaving the viewer to bask in the effusive materiality of her objects and installations. The only artistic view-point offered is the most riveting one: What you get is what you see.”(2)
Stacked Grid (2020) is a large-scale cube constructed from small interlocking plastic panels. It has roots in minimalism from the sixties. After Robert Morris (1931-2018) dropped his “objects” into the galleries of the world it is hard not to recall them when looking at any subsequent incarnations. Similar to Morris’s sculptures, Donovan’s work has its own reality and doesn’t imitate anything that exists in the world. We have to respond only to what is in front of us.
With minimalism, no attempt is made to represent an outside reality, the artist wants the viewer to respond only to what is in front of them. The medium, (or material) from which it is made and the form of the work is the reality. Minimalist painter Frank Stella famously said about his paintings ‘What you see is what you see’.[3]
Unlike early minimalists such as Dolad Judd (1928-1984), who deliberately, at least in theory, avoided all forms of expression; Donovan’s work is emotional and personal. She is finding uniqueness and poetry in the world of mass production, and the magical transformation of mundane into sublime is almost surreal. In his exhibition review for Art on Paper from 2004, Dan Tranberg observes: “Donovan’s work makes the universe feel seamless. Rather than speaking of disparate worlds, her constructions effectively transform society’s junk into striking mirrors of the fundamental properties of nature.”[4]
Installation view of the exhibition Intermediaries at Pace, Photo credit © Irina Sheynfeld, 2021
Donovan often adapts her core ideas to fit the space in which her art is exhibited. The artist works with a team of assistants that help her create her large installations. She likes to speak about re-manufacturing her materials, surpassing their intended use, and giving them new life.[4] Another work currently on display at Pace is Sphere (2020), a 6-foot-diameter sphere, constructed from clear PETG plastic tubes – a material used to make water bottles. The scale of the work and its physical presence works seamlessly with the dimensionality of the gallery. Shapes of the people that stand behind the sphere look like ghostly apparitions caught in a crystal ball, becoming part of the work and its magic.
What: Tara Donovan: Intermediaries
Where: Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY
(appointments required: schedule your visit here!)
When: January 15 – March 6, 2021
Installation view of the exhibition Intermediaries at Pace, Photo credit © Irina Sheynfeld, 2021
Footnotes
Lauren Christensen, “Tara Donovan, a Sculptor Who Finds Beauty in the Mundane,” The New York Times (The New York Times, September 20, 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/books/tara-donovan-fieldwork.html.
Jenni Sorkin, “Infinite Modularity,” in Tara Donovan: Fieldwork (Denver, CO: MCA Denver; New York, New York, 2018), p. 101.
Tate, “Minimalism – Art Term,” Tate, accessed February 17, 2021, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/minimalism.
Dan Tranberg, Art on Paper 8, no. 4 (2004): 75-76. Accessed February 17, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24559698.
Kara Vander Weg, "Tara Donovan's Organic Chemistry." Art on Paper 9, no. 3 (2005): 58-61. Accessed February 17, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24556243.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abrams, Nora Burnett, Tara Donovan, Jenni Sorkin, and Giuliana Bruno. Tara Donovan: Fieldwork. Denver, CO: MCA Denver; New York, New York, 2018.
Christensen, Lauren. “Tara Donovan, a Sculptor Who Finds Beauty in the Mundane.” The New York Times. The New York Times, September 20, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/books/tara-donovan-fieldwork.html.
“Tara Donovan.” Pace Gallery. Accessed March 3, 2021. https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/tara-donovan/.