Renowned artist Tara Donovan has made a name for herself by creating brilliant sculptures made from various items we see in our everyday lives. She has created works of art from buttons, plastic cups, and straws.
One of her most famous pieces is a 2015 sculpture of rock formations similar to Utah’s Bryce Canyon or Turkey’s Cappadocia mountain range. The piece is made of index cards and stands 8 to 13 feet tall. Her 11th solo exhibition at Pace Gallery is now open, and she continues to use everyday items — this time, it’s CD-ROMs.
“Stratagems,” on display from May 3 to Aug. 16, is a collection of spiraling sculptures made entirely from CDs.
Tugging on some nostalgic heartstrings for viewers, Donovan used the preferred media platform of the late 1990s to mid-2000s to handcraft 11 green sculptures that stand 7 to 11 feet tall. Pace curator Oliver Shultz told Fast Company that the sculptures represent the advancement of technology and its trail of waste in the process.
“Now, it’s such an outmoded format that it can be difficult to find a computer that retains the ability to load data from a CD!” Shultz said to Fast Company.
Donovan secured thousands of CDs for her art. She went to secondhand shops and eBay, eventually working with a specialist to track them down. All the CDs were organized by color. They were carefully stacked together to conceal the labels and shaped like a helix. Once the light reflects through them, tiny rainbows flash across them.
“Drawing on the formal language of Minimalism and Postminimalism, Donovan’s works both use and misuse such nontraditional materials, transforming them into visually dazzling compositions without obliterating their fundamental essences or histories as objects from everyday life,” the exhibit press release explained. “Through acts of accumulation, aggregation, and iteration, she transmutes her materials into shapeshifting works of art, which explore the possibilities — and limits — of human perception.”
The exhibition opened at the same time as Frieze Week in New York. More than 60 galleries from 25 countries had exhibitions at the art fair.
At Pace, choreographer Kim Brandt performed at Donovan’s exhibition. Brandt has performed similarly at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Photo Courtesy ©Tara Donovan/Pace Gallery
Donovan has been a mainstay in the international art scene since she gained fame in 2000. She was born in Flushing, Queens, and has earned spots at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art (both in New York City). She has also exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Saint Louis Art Museum; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; Milwaukee Art Museum; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; Humlebaek in Denmark; and the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck in Germany.
Art has always been a medium to spur environmental activism. The works of the late Newton Harrison opened eyes to the roll pollution and drought in ravaging ecosystems. Out-of-commission wind turbines are being turned into urban sculptures and outdoor art in Ohio. Students in Wyoming turned recycled bottles into a national park attraction. These examples show how items have secondary uses and the importance of recycling.
