Untitled (Rubber Bands)

Tara Donovan embraces an aesthetic based on unlimited growth, rather than the inertia and decay of Robert Smithson's Earthworks. Donovan's installations focus on a single industrially manufactured material from which she coaxes monumental organic forms. Her prints also convey the physical nature of these materials. For the Fogg's relief print she affixed nearly 2,500 coiled rubber bands to a base as a printing matrix, pulling thirty five impressions directly from the inked upper surface of the bands. The variations in the density of the ink and the shape and tightness of the coils combine to form an expansive, shimmering field that, like the rest of Donovan's oeuvre, reveals its material basis on close inspection.