Materialist: beginning with some humble utilitarian item—a drinking straw, a loop of tape, a sheet of tar paper—Tara Donovan amasses individual units in such prodigious quantities that, eventually, an esthetic transformation takes place

"What's the matter?" might have been the most relevant question to ask as you walked into Tara Donovan's jaw-dropping, sleight-of-eye show at Ace Gallery this past spring. The 33-year-old artist's New York solo debut, a quantitative and qualitative tour de force, brought oohs of amazement and aahs of disbelief when the matter in question turned out to be pencils, drinking straws, fishing line, twist ties, Scotch tape, glue and other ephemera of everyday life, multiplied to the point of delirium to create its own kind of alchemy, its own miracles.

Donovan, who had a solo show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1999, first garnered attention in New York during the 2000 Whitney Biennial With Ripple (1998), a dense, squiggly circular floor piece made out of snippets of electrical wire. This was followed by a solo show at Ace in Los Angeles in 2001. While her penchant for unlikely mass-produced, utilitarian materials is shared by such labor-intensive contemporaries as Tim Hawkinson, Tom Friedman and Sarah Sze, Donovan's urge to accumulate is unsurpassed for the sheer number of parts mobilized on its behalf. Factor in the hours needed to assemble these installations, and you begin to get a sense of the scope of her efforts. (This show, for instance, took the artist and six assistants 18 nonstop days to install.) Donovan says laughingly that she didn't deliberately set out to make her life hell. It just happened.

Describing her methods, she explains, "I have a system, I have specific rules for myself." One cardinal rule is never to alter the nature of the material or disguise it. She selects a material, determines its specific properties and peculiarities, its density, texture and measurements, looking for fugitive effects: color, light, optical illusion, pattern. If satisfied, she makes a module. From this basic, infinitely expandable unit, she constructs her immense, site-specific projects, most often floor works, that read in part as homages to Process, Minimalist and Post-Minimalist artists such as Eva Hesse, Robert Morris and Richard Serra, but softened, more referential, conjuring up landscapes, cityscapes, phenomena both natural and unnatural. "What I want to do," she says, "is to fix the ephemeral and submit the inconsequential to the processes of art-making." Donovan denies that her enterprise is obsessive: "Obsession is repetition that doesn't go anywhere, while my work goes toward an end, a specific point dictated by the architecture [of the site]."

The astonishing Haze (2003), her most recent work, was the centerpiece of the Ace show. From a distance, it looked like a wall-to-wall cloudbank, extending 42 feet laterally and climbing 12 1/2, its ruffled upper edge incandescent, rimmed by light. As you drew nearer, it became apparent that the surface facing you peaked and recessed, mounded and dipped. Soon enough, you realized that what confronted you was a vertical plane composed of clear plastic drinking straws--just under two million of them--resting on top of one another perpendicular to the wall, some flush against it, others pulled out to modulate the field, while slight variations in the straws' color created tonal shifts. Between the audacity of the scale and the simplicity of the concept, something uncanny occurred, Donovan says she works the way she does because she is always looking for the "phenomenon"--it doesn't always happen but it did in Haze--that moment when the materials, in interaction with the site, go beyond themselves and anything she has done to them to become much, much more.

Transplanted (2001), in the adjacent gallery, also dazzled, its dimensions equally daunting--the size, say, of many New Yorkers' two-bedroom apartments. Stacked almost 3 feet high on the floor, taking the form of a big square centered beneath the skylight, the glinting, undulating construction resembled a crusty, geometricized lava bed but revealed itself to be torn sheets of tar paper laid against each other, ripped edges lapping.

Nebolous (2000), although much more modest in scale, was the show's most winsome installation. Made of seemingly countless loops of Scotch tape stuck to each other, it rose from the concrete floor like delicately tinted mist or a bed of strange, translucent underwater flora. Abetted by Donovan, the material once more triumphed over itself, as this throw-away product became a thing of fleeting, whimsical beauty.

Downsizing the scale even more was an untitled plump, gray-green cushion that was less than 2 feet across and resembled round dumps of grass--an effect coaxed out of untold lengths of fishing line. Suspended from the ceiling by an invisible monofilament was another work, a light and lovely disposable chandelier made out of twist ties, the ultimate summer camp project.

However, Colony (2000), yet another floor piece, was a little too predictable, composed of pencils cut off at different lengths to evoke a diminutive cityscape, and Moire (2000) never quite transcended its ponderous reality, a number of hefty spools of accounting tape sequenced like stepping stones to form a meandering path, the swirls of paper reminiscent of moire patterns without the shimmer. Strata (2001), a scatter piece, also misfired. While the milky discs of dried Elmer's glue from which it was made were in themselves seductive and might be mistaken for melted wax, the ensemble did not achieve the dramatic transformation evident in most of the other works; it failed to ignite. More often, however, Donovan, succeeds, and when she does, her combination of mundane material and extreme quantities is irresistible, a brilliant canonization of the temporal that can be both poetic and revelatory. Who among the viewers of Haze, for instance, will not look at straws with new reverence?