Sun Style + Tara Donovan

For the first time, Donovan determines a composition prior to the work’s creation and brings it into realization through mark-making within the self-defined parameters of a traditional picture plane. The optical effect—a visual field with shifting viewpoints—is central, underlining and expanding upon a concept that has defined much of the artist’s installation and sculptural work.
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In [Jonathan T.D.] Neil’s catalogue essay [Neil] relates Donovan’s new work to psychologist James J. Gibson’s mid-twentieth century theories on the “ecological approach” to the study of vision. . . . Donovan’s new drawings, Neil proposes, reposition perceptual experience (both literally and figuratively) at the forefront of visual concern in the digital era[:] . . . “we could say that nature is still at stake in these works[;] it is the nature of human perceptual experience, an experience that is undergoing a massive reshaping at present, all at the hands, or rather through the inhuman eye, of a screen.”