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Looks like I picked the wrong day to visit the Institute of Contemporary Art — by the time I got down to the harbor from South Station, my pant legs were stuck to my legs with ice-cold, sleety rain, and my shoes were squelching. The hand dryer in the bathroom was a semi-effective fix, but I was still rather soggy.
Even so, I'm glad I went. The ICA is free on Thursday evenings (5 to 9), and through January they're exhibiting the work of MacArthur Grant-winner Tara Donovan. She combines household objects, thousands and thousands of identical household objects, into room-filling, quasi-organic sculptures. An undulating surface of styrofoam cups depends from the ceiling of one room; in another, an inconceivable length of Scotch tape lies in loops on the floor, forming a topographic map of a pale continent, or a spill of soap suds, or a collection of lace and artificial roses. A long rectangular hole in one wall is filled with long rolls of polyester film, looped and piled and squashed in patterns that look like slices of amber or agate from the side, and mirrored tunnels (through which other attendees could be seen, peering back) from straight on. I was most taken with her piece Bluffs, clear plastic buttons stacked in towers that resemble stalagmites and melted wax and coral. Surprising and affecting — if you live in Boston, why not go?
Their other exhibits were more of a mixed bag — there were a lot of photographs that didn't do anything for me — but three installations stood out:
Even so, I'm glad I went. The ICA is free on Thursday evenings (5 to 9), and through January they're exhibiting the work of MacArthur Grant-winner Tara Donovan. She combines household objects, thousands and thousands of identical household objects, into room-filling, quasi-organic sculptures. An undulating surface of styrofoam cups depends from the ceiling of one room; in another, an inconceivable length of Scotch tape lies in loops on the floor, forming a topographic map of a pale continent, or a spill of soap suds, or a collection of lace and artificial roses. A long rectangular hole in one wall is filled with long rolls of polyester film, looped and piled and squashed in patterns that look like slices of amber or agate from the side, and mirrored tunnels (through which other attendees could be seen, peering back) from straight on. I was most taken with her piece Bluffs, clear plastic buttons stacked in towers that resemble stalagmites and melted wax and coral. Surprising and affecting — if you live in Boston, why not go?
Their other exhibits were more of a mixed bag — there were a lot of photographs that didn't do anything for me — but three installations stood out:
- A collection of Modernist mirrored bottles in a mirrored box, which reflected each other in diminishing and distorted ranks off to infinity, but eerily did not reflect the viewer;
- An animation in silhouette projected in a skewed trapezoid onto the floor, which only a little boy seemed willing to walk across; and
- A deeply moving mobile made from pieces of charred wood, suspended in a rectangular volume of space and slowly twisting. The wood had come from a woodworking shop that burned down under suspicious circumstances.
