Fieldwork, a new exhibition at the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago by American artist Tara Donovan, presents an inventive and imaginative view into the nature of materiality. 

The dynamic exhibition, made up of a collection of sculptural works by Donovan interpreting a variety of "mundane" and industrially-derived materials, creates textured works that occupy space in dramatic fashion. 

First organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the exhibition demonstrates how "order and structure give way to unpredictability and how the mundane cedes to the marvelous," according to the exhibition website. 

Included in the exhibition is a work titled Haze that uses yellowed plastic straws to create a bubbling wall that evokes a mountain range, for example, filling out the end of one gallery while seeming to provide a view to an exterior world.

In another room, an untitled work uses stacks of Styrene index cards to create a field of stalagmites, towering masses that occupy space solidly along the floor but rise up in a series of diminishing peaks. 

A pair of metallic works nearby are fashioned from bundles of Slinkys. One room-defining work is shaped like a billowing cloud and is packed tight with pillowy bundles of tight curls. A second, flatter sculpture marks and turns an interior corner, shaping space while outlining the forms of a reef alive with corral. 

Meanwhile, the exhibition’s showstopper, an untitled mass of mylar and hot glue, rises and falls in a symphony of bubbles, like a noxious stream of oil spewing out of the ocean floor. In a different room, a work titled Transplanted is organized as a large stacked topography made up of tar paper that resembles a super-sized hunk of slate. 

Together, the works envision a sort of ironic naturalism, reminding us not only that everything we use and touch comes from nature but that ultimately, those things will find their way back to a natural state in some way or another. 

The exhibition is on view through September 22nd.