For several months this winter and spring, a 1,600-square-foot gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Lila Acheson Wallace Wing is being taken over by a sprawling chain of hundreds of thousands of silvery bubbles that clings to the walls like some sort of industrial ivy. This striking work is Tara Donovan’s Untitled (Mylar), a site-specific installation that is the fourth in a series of exhibitions at the museum of midcareer artists, following Tony Oursler, Kara Walker, and Neo Rauch.

From afar Donovan’s work is a curious, enigmatic form. It suggests various shapes and alludes to every imaginable scale, from the general outline and topography of a continent as seen in a satellite image, to a coral reef spotted by the naked eye, to the intricate crystalline structure of a snowflake viewed through a microscope. But if it seems bewildering at first, Untitled (Mylar), like all of Donovan’s work, is easier to figure out when you examine it up close. In her typical fashion, the artist has created the work using a single, rather simple industrial product. In previous installations, she has employed paper plates, toothpicks, Styrofoam cups, pencils, drinking straws, and rubber bands. Here she turns to Mylar, a shiny polyester film used in such products as Polaroids, audio- and videocassettes, and the packaging of microwavable meals.

With a team of approximately eight assistants, Donovan prepared for the installation during several labor-intensive months in her studio, cutting hundreds of thousands of strips of half-inch-wide Mylar tape and looping them into one-inch circles. Adhesive on the outside of the loops allowed them to gather into discrete groupings—dozens of conjoined circles that recall bunches of grapes, patches of scaly skin, or spongy cells bumping up against one another to form a tissue. During a busy six-day installation, Donovan and her team affixed these groupings with nails to the Met’s gallery walls and arranged them side by side to create two seemingly continuous strands, each spanning two adjacent walls. A great deal of care also went into the lighting, a bright, even floor-to-ceiling glow. As it plays off the reflective Mylar, the light creates tones ranging from shiny silver to glimmering white.

Although Untitled (Mylar) is in many ways a typical Donovan, it differs from her other work in a few crucial ways. First is the use of Mylar itself, a more esoteric and less immediately recognizable material than she tends to use. Second, and more significant, is the work’s organic feel. If many of the artist’s other pieces employ symmetry and geometric pattern, here is a freewheeling, less tidy structure suggestive of living forms. In places the loops are densely packed, nearly filling the wall from floor to ceiling; elsewhere they thin into wisps that make little mark on the white background. The piece is characterized, in other words, by a natural ebb and flow, a rhythm that evokes breathing, pulsing, throbbing, even in an installation that is fixed in place. The effect is playful, and the work feels animate. One senses great improvisation in the installation process. And although the work is clearly unable to expand beyond the gallery walls, it implies a pattern that could stretch on and on.

As ever with Donovan’s work, the great strength of the piece is how it alludes to recognizable forms without ever quite speaking their names. Take a look at the installation and endless metaphors come to mind—a mountainous topography, an exquisite fractal, an ominous viral growth. Yet in the end the work remains nothing more than thousands and thousands of tiny Mylar loops, bunched together in a seemingly random, though visually gratifying, formation. Without suggesting that this inanimate silver tape is anything other than purely mundane, Donovan has found a way to uncover its inherent potential as a building block of wondrous form. And in doing so she has given Mylar something of a new purpose, which in its objectless indeterminacy strangely resembles our own.

“Tara Donovan at the Met” is on view through April 27.

"(Un)Natural Order" comes to ARTINFO from the winter 2008 issue of Museums magazine.