Tara Donovan: Fieldwork
June 14–September 22, 2019
Fieldwork celebrates American artist Tara Donovan’s distinctive practice that transforms mundane materials like plastic straws, index cards, rubber bands, Slinkys, and Mylar into elaborate, mind-bending objects evocative of the natural world.
Donovan manipulates a material over and over again, to see what it is capable of becoming, where it might lead, and how it migrates from an object of practical use to something surreal or sublime. In some instances, she reworks a material into both two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms, engaging with space and light in nuanced and unexpected ways.
Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, this exhibition presents, for the first time, wall-based and freestanding objects together, demonstrating how fully the artist reimagines everyday materials. Taken together, the works in this exhibition demonstrate how order and structure give way to unpredictability and how the mundane cedes to the marvelous.
Tara Donovan was born in 1969 in New York City, where she currently lives and works.
Installation view, Tara Donovan: Fieldwork, Smart Museum of Art, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery. Photo: Michael Tropea.
Tara Donovan, Untitled (Mylar), 2011/2019, Mylar and hot glue, Dimensions variable. Installation view, Tara Donovan: Fieldwork, Smart Museum of Art, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery. Photo: Michael Tropea.
