Monday, February 14, 2011

Field Trip: Tara Donovan

Tara Donovan: Drawings (Pins)
The Pace Gallery 510 W 25th St, NYC
Feb 12, 2011 - Mar 19, 2011

See website for images from this current exhibition: The Pace Gallery

In her latest series, "Drawings (Pins)", on view this month at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea, shimmering metallic "canvases" are composed of dressmaker pins — tens of thousands of them. The cumulative effect is almost painterly. While these works are two-dimensional, they deal with the same issues as her "site-responsive" sculptures, as she calls them: "It’s all about perceiving this material from a distance and close up and how the light interacts with it."

-- Julia Curtin amarcordian (more)

The new series, which in fact arose from a stretch of print-making, is a perceptual delight, with light striking the pins in such a way that some clusters appear as inky black, others as gray, still others as shimmery silver, like a lake glancing in the setting winter sun.

-- ARTINFO (more)

While the majority of the drawings on view are visual fields that radiate from different light sources (determined by the density of pins on the surface area), two of the earliest works in the show depict clusters of circular organic shapes evoking cellular or molecular forms.

-- The Pace Gallery | Pace Press Release (more- pdf)



Tara Donovan.mov (Video: PacePrints)

Tara Donovan builds large, labor-intensive, and site-specific installations out of everyday materials such as scotch tape, drinking straws, paper plates, roofing paper and Styrofoam cups. Donovan takes these materials and grows them through accumulation. The results are large-scale abstract floor and wall works suggestive of landscapes, clouds, cellular structures and even mold or fungus. In her words, "it is not like I'm trying to simulate nature. It's more of a mimicking of the way of nature, the way things actually grow."

-- Pace Prints Tara Donovan Artist Portfolio (more)

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What appeared to be a question of object/non-object has turned out to be a question of seeing and not seeing, of how it is we actually perceive or fail to perceive “things” in their real contexts. Now we are presented and challenged with the infinite, everyday richness of “phenomenal” perception (and the potential for a corresponding “phenomenal art,” with none of the customary abstract limitations as to form, place, materials and so forth) – one which seeks to discover and value the potential for experiencing beauty in everything.


-- Robert Irwin, Being and Circumstance: Notes Toward a Confidential Art