Artist Tara Donovan has long been fascinated by what happens when the ordinary is pushed beyond recognition. Plastic cups become topographies, rubber bands suggest cellular growth, and Scotch tape thickens into atmospheric fog. With Stratagems, her most recent body of work, Donovan turns this logic outward—toward the city itself—creating sculptures that do not merely occupy space, but actively converse with architecture, light, and time.

Installed in the glass-walled Annex Gallery at San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid Center and presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco (ICA SF), Stratagems transforms a landmark of modernist ambition into a responsive sculptural environment. Here, accumulation becomes a language capable of speaking fluently with the vertical rhythms of the skyline.

Accumulation as Method, Transformation as Meaning

Donovan’s practice is grounded in systems: repetition, aggregation, and material pressure applied at scale. Since the late 1990s, she has worked almost exclusively with mass-produced objects—paper plates, buttons, straws, tar paper—subjecting them to labor-intensive processes that erase their original identity.

Works such as Transplanted (2001), composed of tar paper, or Haze (2003), constructed from drinking straws, established her signature approach: artificial materials yielding unexpectedly organic forms. These installations evoke fog banks, mineral accretions, fungal blooms—phenomena that feel natural despite their industrial origins. Even early pieces like Colony (2000) hinted at urban expansion and the Anthropocene, suggesting how human systems replicate the logic of nature while reshaping it irrevocably.

Stratagems and the Vertical Imagination

In Stratagems, Donovan sharpens this inquiry by addressing architecture directly. The sculptures are built entirely from thousands of recycled CDs—once symbols of technological progress, now cultural detritus. Wrapped around steel armatures and anchored on concrete plinths, the works rise vertically, forming shimmering spires that recall both skyscrapers and crystalline geological formations.

Their surfaces are alive to change. As daylight shifts, clouds pass, or the viewer moves through the space, the CDs fracture and reassemble light, producing a constant visual recalibration. The sculptures never settle into a single image; they perform perception itself.

This responsiveness finds its ideal counterpart in the Transamerica Pyramid Center. Completed in 1972, the building’s tapered, pyramidal form was designed to maximize light at street level—an architectural gesture that now resonates with Donovan’s own preoccupation with illumination, reflection, and spatial awareness.

Architecture as Collaborator, Not Container

Within the Annex Gallery’s glass enclosure, Stratagems mirrors the building’s vertical ambition and reflective skin. The skyscraper ceases to function as a neutral backdrop and instead becomes an active collaborator. Donovan’s spires echo the Pyramid’s upward thrust, while their shimmering surfaces refract the surrounding cityscape back into the gallery.

I am always fixated on the ways that sculptures transform space and experience.

– Donovan has noted, and here that transformation operates at an urban scale.

The works prompt viewers to see architecture not as static mass, but as a living system—one that, like the sculptures themselves, registers time, atmosphere, and technological change.

This alignment exemplifies ICA SF’s nomadic exhibition model, which positions contemporary art within sites that expand how it is encountered. By embedding Stratagems within the city rather than isolating it from urban life, the exhibition recalibrates the relationship between art, public space, and daily movement.

Obsolete Media, Evolving Values

The choice of CDs is far from incidental. Once the dominant medium for music distribution, the compact disc was rapidly eclipsed by MP3s and, later, streaming platforms. In Donovan’s hands, this obsolete technology becomes both material and metaphor.

Placed inside a modernist icon that itself belongs to a previous architectural era; the sculptures invite reflection on how values shift over time—how progress leaves artifacts in its wake. The CDs’ mirrored surfaces hold traces of the past while responding fluidly to the present, collapsing technological history into a single, luminous surface.

A Towering Meditation on Space and Change

Stratagems distill the essence of Tara Donovan’s practice: a belief that meaning emerges through sustained engagement with material, scale, and context. By aligning sculptural accumulation with skyscraper architecture, she reveals unexpected affinities between human-made systems and natural processes.

On view through July 31, the exhibition stands as a quiet yet powerful intervention into the city—one that reframes how we experience space, light, and the material residue of our own technological ambitions. In Donovan’s hands, even the most familiar objects can still rise, shimmer, and transform the way we see.