Installation artist Tara Donovan’s hallmark is her use of ordinary mass-produced products in repetitive patterns and layering. Donovan has used materials as banal as plastic drinking straws, fishing wire, paper plates, tar paper, Styrofoam cups, wooden toothpicks, tempered glass and steel pins in her fascinating installations, quite often relying on friction and gravity to keep the piece together. What is so interesting about Donovan’s work is that the viewer, accustomed to seeing the materials in a familiar domestic context, has to re-think and re-visualize them as they take shape in new forms. (One cannot help but wonder how many pins could be safely pulled from their cube before creating an altogether new, and untidy, structure.)

Artist: Tara Donovan
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