calendario eventi  :: 

X

9/10/2008

Tara Donovan

The Institute of Contemporary Art - ICA, Boston

The first museum survey of American sculptor Tara Donovan opens Oct. 10th at The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Featuring 16 sculptures and installations from the past decade including a new work created for the exhibition, Tara Donovan traces the ambitious process of this young artist. With acute awareness of the aesthetic properties of her materials, Donovan takes mass quantities of everyday items—tape, plastic cups, toothpicks, buttons—and “assembles them in different ways, providing the viewer with a compelling, perceptually transformative experience,” according to The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which recently named the artist a recipient of this year’s “genius” grants. On view at the ICA from Oct. 10, 2008 to Jan. 4, 2009, Tara Donovan then travels to the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati (Feb. 7–May 11, 2009), the Des Moines Arts Center (June 19–Sept. 13, 2009) and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (Oct. 10, 2009–Jan. 16, 2010).

“This groundbreaking exhibition of Tara Donovan’s sculpture is a timely opportunity to experience Donovan’s evolution as an artist and brings needed scholarship to her artistic practice,” says Jill Medvedow, Director of The Institute of Contemporary Art.

“Donovan has an exceptional understanding of how individual items can confound and astound when configured en masse,” according to the ICA’s Nicholas Baume and Jen Mergel, co-curators of the exhibition. “She installs her configurations with great sensitivity to the fusion between material, light and architecture, achieving effects that approach the sublime.”

Donovan’s artistic process explores how a single action applied to a single material countless times can transcend our expectations. In Untitled (Plastic Cups), Donovan stacks over a million plastic cups within a rectangular perimeter to create what resembles an undulating sea. Although presented in a grid, a system Minimalist artists of the 1960s used for its rational geometric order, Donovan’s cups defy containment. Instead, the artist’s simple system of stacking unleashes the possibility for limitless reproduction and expansion. In this way, Donovan’s work seems to evoke our own era of infinite digital and cellular networks whose exact proportions are boundless and unknowable.

Donovan’s sculptures are often deliberately integrated with their architectural setting, expanding or contracting according to the exhibition space in a manner the artist terms “site-reponsive”. In Untitled (2008)—the artist’s newest major installation commissioned by the ICA—a wall separating two of the ICA’s galleries, has been cut and filled with thousands of feet of clear polyester sheeting rhythmically folded and layered upon itself. Donovan specifically sited the piece within this wall to allow natural light from Boston Harbor and incandescent light from the gallery to filter through both sides of the transparent plastic form.

From toothpick cubes to Mylar constellations, Donovan’s work combines contradictory properties in commonplace materials—the manufactured and the natural, the familiar and the otherworldly—to dazzling effect. As artist Chuck Close was recently quoted as saying, “[Tara’s] material never stops being what it is, and yet it builds into an amazing apparition.”—Vogue.

Born in 1969 in New York, NY, Tara Donovan has had solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (2007), the Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2006), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA (2004), among others. Her work was featured in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and she was the recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant in 2008, and the Alexander Calder Foundation’s first annual Calder Prize (2005). She received her MFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA (1999). Donovan lives and works in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

The exhibition and publication were generously supported by Chuck and Kate Brizius and Barbara Lee.

Tour Venues
Following the ICA, Tara Donovan travels to the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati (Feb. 7-May 11, 2009), the Des Moines Arts Center (June 19 - Sept. 13, 2009) and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (Oct. 10, 2009 - Jan. 16, 2010).

Publication
The ICA exhibition is accompanied by the publication, Tara Donovan, a comprehensive 160-page monograph co-published by The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and The Monacelli Press/Random House, New York. Contents include an introductory essay by ICA associate curator Jen Mergel and ICA chief curator Nicholas Baume; a conversation between Tara Donovan and Lawrence Weschler; an afterword by ICA director Jill Medvedow, and approximately 70 reproductions of all of Donovan’s works to date.

Programs

Tuesday, Oct. 14, 7:30 p.m.
Tara Donovan in Conversation with Lawrence Weschler

As Tara Donovan opens her first major museum survey, the Brooklyn-based sculptor discusses her work with Lawrence Weschler, a writer known for making surprising connections between seemingly disparate ideas and images. A New Yorker staff writer for more than 20 years, Weschler is the author of a dozen books of creative nonfiction, including the 2006 collection of essays Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Tickets: $12 general admission; $8 members, students, and seniors.

Lunchtime Gallery Talks
A new addition to the museum’s public programming, ICA curators share their perspectives on working with today's artists in a series of lunchtime talks, all taking place at 12 noon and lasting about 45 minutes, including Q & A.

Free with museum admission. Space is limited. Free tickets are available first-come, first-served one hour before the program. Ticket holders are eligible for a 10% discount at the Water Café. May not be combined with any other offer.

Thursday, Oct. 16
Jen Mergel, Associate Curator
Tara Donovan

Thursday, Dec. 11
Jen Mergel, Associate Curator/Nicholas Baume, Chief Curator
Tara Donovan

Image: Untitled (Styrofoam Cups), 2003. Installation view, Ace Gallery, Los Angeles, 2005. Photo credit: Ace Gallery, Los Angeles, Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York.

Press contact
Colette Randall at 617-478-3181 or crandall@icaboston.org

The Institute of Contemporary Art, located at 100 Northern Avenue, Boston, MA 02210
Open Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 am – 5 pm; Thursday and Friday, 10 am – 9 pm; and Saturday and Sunday, 10 am – 5 pm.
Admission is $12 adults, $10 seniors and students, and free for members and children 17 and under. Free admission on Target Free Thursday Nights, 5-9 pm.

stampa

permanent link