If you haven't heard of Tara Donovan its time to go visit the ICA. Not only did she just receive the MacArthur "Genius" Grant, she's having her first major museum survey right here in Boston and the work is borderline indescribable. Donovan works with everyday objects — toothpicks, styrofoam cups, scotch tape — in huge volumes, taking them to the point where they look nothing like their mass-manufactured self but take on an entirely natural, organic, even transcendent persona...
The body of work is a collection from the past decade with one stunning new commission for the ICA, pictured above, made with rolled vellum. There are more images of the exhibit on the ICA website but nothing comes close to seeing these pieces in person — moving around them, watching how the play of light and shadow transforms each piece.
Our favorites, in addition to the new commission, were the button stalagmites and drinking straw wall. It totally inspired us to come home and look at our everyday objects in a whole new way.
We couldn't help but think that the brains over at Anthropologie are totally on the same wave length in the retail realm, constantly taking everyday objects to a new aesthetic level.
Tara Donovan runs through January 4, 2009 at the ICA Boston. A wonderful interview where Tara Donovan discusses the origin of her work over at DesignObserver.
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Comments (4)
Tara has been a huge inspiration to me for the year and a half I have known about her. She is making a killing in the art scene right now. (I saw an installation in the Met!) And she deserves every bit of praise she gets.
Honestly I do not know how many assistance she has to help her put these up but it doesn't really matter. The foresight to know that this collection of toothpicks will soon be beautiful is enough to credit her with being an astonishing artist.
Good work, Tara.
Great work. it was nice to finally see it in person. I wish the ica was larger. i think the show would have worked better in ps1.
Did she make the luminously beautiful corridor of 20,000 bars of neutrogena soap I saw in a Chelsea gallery a few weeks ago?
The installation she did at the Met was unbelievable.....I happened upon it by chance and didn't know anything about her before I saw it. It was truly memorable....made even more so for me by the sheer luck of stumbling across it. And the posting is right, pictures don't even begin to do justice to these works.