Monday, November 10, 2008

Tara Donovan at the ICA

After the Anish Kapoor exhibit, I was thrilled to see the ICA in Boston hit yet another home run with a show of Tara Donovan's work. I had never heard of Donovan or seen her sculpture prior to this exhibit opening, so I was absolutely blown away by what I saw. Donovan works systematically by piling, weaving, clustering, or otherwise building single units of an everyday object into something all together new. She explores "how a single action applied to a single material countless times can transcend our expectations." It's how I imagine bees make honeycomb from wax— only she does it with things like Styrofoam cups (above) or paper plates (below).
Much of the work is site specific, or had to be created on the spot for the show— one example being the cube below, made entirely of toothpicks. True story: it's held together by gravity alone, and not a dab of glue. The show is up until January 4th, and is definitely worth checking out. ••••

2 comments:

Sarah Martin said...

These are really amazing. Can you imagine if you were in the gallery, tripped, and fell on the tooth pick cube. Whoops!

Meghan Colvin said...

Ha! Martin, that's hilarious. But really, it's held up with NO glue?! that's INCREDIBLE!