Tara Donovan: Untitled (Toothpicks)

Quint Gallery’s ONE is pleased to present Untitled (Toothpicks), 2004 by sculptor and installation artist Tara Donovan. With careful attention to the physical properties of mass-produced products, Donovan has developed forms that are meticulously aggregated and accumulated. In this artwork, thousands of toothpicks form a cube only through gravity and friction and are transformed through repetition.

Though Donovan’s practice is guided by seeking the point where material grows beyond identification, scale in relation to the viewer plays an equally active role. In the same way that grains of sand become dunes, densely packed under sheer accumulation yet commanded by forces of nature, Untitled (Toothpicks) may gradually shift and shed as a result of movement around the gallery.

Donovan earned a BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in 1991, and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1999.  Donovan’s sculptures and installations are in public collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. In 2008, Donovan was granted a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.” She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.