Taking Over the Met's Walls With Mylar

When viewing Tara Donovan’s installation pieces, it can be hard to tell exactly what you are looking at. At first, that is.

Donovan works with everyday materials like plastic straws, toothpicks, pencils, and scotch tape to create large-scale installations that she characterizes as “site-responsive.” Each piece consists of thousands, if not millions, of units of a single material, which, through the interplay of light and visual texture, create an effect that is even greater than the sum of its parts.

Over the past few months, Donovan and her team of eight to 10 assistants have worked to create her latest piece, Untitled (Mylar), for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Gioconda and Joseph King Gallery. The installation consists of thousands of small organic shapes made out of silver Mylar tape, assembled into larger sheets that echo the nebulous forms of the smaller units.

Metallic bubbles stretch across the bare, white walls of the 1,600-square-foot space, effecting a sense of animated growth that is reminiscent both of the delicate tendrils of an unfurling vine and of the amorphous expansion and contraction of an amoeba.

An essential part of Donovan’s project, in this and many of her installations, is the manipulation of light within the space. The walls of silver Mylar in each of the thousands of cells reflect and refract light in all directions, creating a luminescent effect that brightens the entire gallery.

Untitled (Mylar), like much of Donovan’s work, also functions as an interrogation of the properties and purpose of material. The artist selects seemingly meaningless, disposable objects whose aesthetic qualities are typically overlooked. In their original contexts, her materials represent consumerism, reproducibility, and anonymity, but through her process, they are transformed into nearly unrecognizable yet elegantly stunning works of art. Donovan also purposefully mimics topographical and geological formations as well as patterns of growth in the natural world to underscore the contrast between what her materials once were and what they have become.

Of course, the aesthetic of modern art is never guaranteed to please everyone, and the exhibit would not have been complete without a skeptical pair of elderly women whispering, “I just don’t get it, what is the point?” But regardless of personal artistic taste, the exhibit is unquestionably a unique visual experience.