Tara Donovan

Fieldwork celebrates American artist Tara Donovan’s distinct and varied practice, which includes sculpture, drawings, works on paper, and site-responsive installations. Often known for her transformation of neutral or mundane materials into elaborate, mind-bending objects that evoke the natural world or other organic material, Donovan’s work in many ways is about work. She manipulates a material over and over again, to see what it is capable of becoming, where it might lead, and how it will migrate from an object of practical use to something surreal or sublime. In some instances, she reworks a material into both two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms, engaging with space and light in nuanced and unexpected ways.

This exhibition, occupying MCA Denver’s entire building, will be the first time that Donovan’s wall-based and freestanding objects will be installed together, in order to understand fully how the artist re-imagines everyday materials like plastic straws, index cards, rubber bands, Slinkys, and Mylar. A remix of older and recent works will open up new areas of dialogue within her practice and enable viewers to make connections across time and subject matter. The exhibition is about how, through labor (especially repetitive action), order and structure can give way to the unpredictable, where reason yields to faith, and the mundane cedes to the marvelous—truly employing the creative act to seduce visually and, in doing so, override what we know to be factual.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major catalogue, co-published with Rizzoli Electa, featuring essays by Nora Burnett Abrams, Giuliana Bruno, and Jenni Sorkin.

For more information, visit MCA Denver's (opens in a new window) website.