MATERIAL SEDUCTION
by Oriane Stender
Though born in New York, Tara Donovan launched her career in Washington, D.C., with exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery in 1997 and ’99. Her method was clear from the start -- sensuous accumulations of a single type of industrial material, often assembled according to a simple rule, often in a topological scheme. At the 2000 Whitney Biennial, she exhibited Ripple (1998), a floor piece constructed of scads of short pieces of wire arranged to resemble concentric, circular ripples. In 2003 she stacked more than two million clear plastic straws, woodpile-style, against the wall at Ace Gallery in New York.
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