Posted: April 2, 2010
Artist Tara Donovan creates organic and fluid, large-scale sculptures from pedestrian materials such as pencils, plastic cups, tar paper, electrical cable and Mylar. The landscape-type results defy their mundane components and draw upon nature.
"It's all made out of Elmer's Glue," said Donovan, 40, referring to "Strata," an assemblage of dried glue resembling milky white "petals" sprawling across the gallery floor like growing fungus.
The piece is one of six sculptures literally covering a 12,000-square-foot exhibition space inside the Indianapolis Museum of Art in an exhibit that opens Sunday. Visually soft and gentle, sensory tricks happen easily, pulling viewers into their illusions.
Hundreds of thousands of rigid, clear plastic cups stacked in another piece, "Plastic Cups," effectively immerse you into a dreamy, billowy, white landscape. It's surprisingly intimate, even against the backdrop of shocking white walls inside the space.
"I'm not that interested in the practicality, what that material is actually used for. I'm interested in it as a building block," Donovan said.
What makes her work so compelling is that she transforms synthetic, industry-produced materials in an unexpected way, giving them a highly organic feel, said Lisa Freiman, senior curator of contemporary art at the IMA.
"They allude to some natural phenomena," Freiman said about how the cups are augmented and multiplied for the effect. "You look at a plastic cup and you know it's a plastic cup. . . . So when you walk into this room, you don't think to yourself, 'Where's the Kool-Aid?'
"It's a landscape, a surreal landscape that you engage with. They really take on a life of their own, they become something very different."
The interpretive flexibility of the pieces is broad, as is the appeal with audiences of all ages.
"Depending on the amount of experience with art or life that you have, you can approach it in many different ways," Freiman said. "For something that might be perceived as initially simple, there's a lot of complexity. You can make particular associations because of that, or you can just see them in a very literal way."
"It's very multi-tiered," Donovan said. "My goal is to get the work to a point to where it transcends itself and people can have an experience with it."
She does this most elegantly with "Ripple," a transparent sculpture created with shredded electrical cable that reads like water and delicate fabric.
Sprinkled on the floor, it's then pushed together, merging fibers so it appears to somewhat defy gravity.
"Eventually, it will buckle, creating those ripples," Donovan said. "It's sometimes a long and tedious process to get to the point of realizing what it is it can do. But the fact that these fibers can interlock and become this billowy sheet is, I think, really beautiful."
Donovan leaves many of her works and drawings (some made from inky bubbles popping on paper) untitled or employs ambiguous titles so viewers will draw their own associations.
"Like this piece is called 'Colony' (and) references many, many things," she said of a 9-foot wide and 3-inch high sculpture made of pencils. It resembles a topographical map, or possibly an aerial view of a city.
"It was really all inspired by the hexagon, how it's so common in nature, architecture, and that you can build off of it," Donovan said.
For more information, visit www .imamuseum.org.
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