Impressions Of Sight
Impressions of Tara Donovan’s show “Intermediaries” at Pace Gallery Jan 15-Mar 6, 2021
Something is held within the sphere; as you approach, it’s fleeing, moving along with you, tending to your view. A globe of cut tubes becomes a two-way piece, not the circular unity held by a ball.
It takes two to communicate. Looking into this globe, all of your vision is limited to the tubes — only a few, but constantly changing as you move — you have the angle to look through. Your vision is compressed through the tube, comingling with transparencies and reflections; upon reaching the other side, it unfolds, spreads, and tries to reconnect itself, to create a whole picture for you as best as possible. This compression and decompression is a reflection of what happens within you. As you see, the visual input runs through several rungs of a neurological ladder of compression and decompression, as explained by Paul M. Churchland in his book Plato’s Camera. To create your vision, matter is constantly transformed in your interior — this is what allows you to see. I can’t tell if this was what Donovan was considering with this work, but what it does show is that when we mine deep into our way of being, our interior worlds will often be reflected in the exterior construction. An art work in the shape of our eyeball to create for us an experience about the ways in which we see.
This sphere operates in a space constantly moving between 2 and 3D; it often flattens to become a circle and pops back out when you move around it. At which point you encounter the directionality of the tubes forcing a two-way view, wherein the density of the sphere produces a deeper center, making it harder for your gaze to penetrate it. All of this contributes to the effect of an unfolding of vision, as you move perpendicular to the tubes, your vision widens and narrows. Being forced down separate tubes, filled with reflections, as it emerges on the other side, your brain is attempting to stitch it all back together to create a coherent whole, the known whole of the person’s face looking back at you. You know the image, and so your brain is trying to produce it, and only once you’ve convinced your brain to let go of this anticipation can you see the abstract painting that Donovan has turned your vision into. An unidentified series of colors and textures producing a known and unknown whole.
In the next room, a large cubic constellation stands in a rectangular room; almost too big, it pushes you up against the side walls. An endless number of thin plexi sheets are sliced together to form flexible cells, as if a small cube of skin had been extracted and blown up to allow us to see its regular irregularities. Despite being constructed from the same plexi sheets to create a coherent entity, no two instances are ever the same. They all interact to create a whole that seems to have no exterior boundary, becoming just an instance, in permanent flux, vibrating. Your eye constantly has to work to try and find a focus, and just as you think you see something in there, it goes away again. Vanishing into a soft cloud and raising the question of where is the outer boundary? Where does one thing stop and another start? It’s easy to say “at the plexi strips” but we know this is not the true answer. , So where is the threshold and will we ever be able to pinpoint it exactly — and should we even try?
Turning 180 degrees from Stacked Grid, you enter a large dark cave-like space. A painting is hanging on the wall opposite the entrance, drawing you in. A Morrie effect flows across the surface and seems to suggest something metallic, a surface manipulated by touch. Approaching the work, this gesture seems to be moving and scaling with you. It isn’t until you’re up close that you see how porous this surface is, constructed from thousands of plastic tubes. The piece again speaks of the qualities of a skin, scaled to incredible dimension, to reveal to us that we are all porous. That nothing is solid: not our skin, not our gaze. We all take in the world in different ways.
Standing in front of these pieces, they deliver a sense of myself, as if I’m sensing me. The works are extremely personal, only you see them in just this particular way, as they react to your vision. When I unfocus my gaze in front of the Apertures pieces, I’m actually able to produce two white spots, one for each eye, looking individually into the tubes. But as soon as I start to move, they merge to become one again. Stopping to untangle my gaze once again and see the two. Though our vision is this double image of the world, we have trained our brains to produce a whole, in order for us to navigate the world. This double vision of seeing the multiple sides of the work simultaneously brings it into a clear, yet abstract, conversation with cubism. What are the sides of the world that are available to us, but that we have trained our brains to merge, to not see?
The endless repetition performed to see something new, something deeper, below the surface, but only visible because of the surface. The surface becomes the veil through which our gaze is split for it to rebuild itself. We are all endless repetitions of matter, of DNA, of thoughts. We are chaotic systems bound together by our different porosities. The ability to absorb one another, to absorb new knowledge, and to constantly rebuild our existing knowledge, by compressing and decompressing it, is a reflection of our inherent humanity.
Donovan’s show gets to a question that’s been on my mind over the last few years: what’s the difference between seeing and perceiving? The act of absorbing new raw information from our environment and recreating it internally to build our notion of the world. Where do we see, and what we see? How does the work I see enter my body? And why can I take a series of plastic strips and turn them into a conceptual magnified section of skin that is connected to cubism? All the porosities of our bodies, we want to consider ourselves as solid beings, so often so sure of ourselves and our beliefs that we fight to let anything in. But we are not closed entities, as Vito Acconci so explicitly demonstrated in rubbing a tomato through his stomach. Where do we take in the world around us? Don’t we see with our entire being?
We are constantly taking in the world, we simply can’t help not to; so the question is what are we doing internally to make sense of the information? How much have we trained our view to see in a specific way, put it on autopilot? How much are we insulating ourselves from information that our brains have deemed unnecessary for us to get from point A to point B in life? Tara Donovan is showing us a way to re-engage with our vision, to spend time looking deeper into the porous surface of the seemingly whole objects that we meet in our day-to-day lives, to investigate our vision, our sense-making, and the lenses we hold up to the world.
“It is a startling truth that how you see and what you see determine how and who you will be. An interesting way of beginning to do some interior work is to explore your particular style of seeing. Ask yourself, What way do I behold the world? Through this question, you will discover your specific pattern of seeing” John O’Donohue
