JOHN HENRY DONNER 2

It's been six months since I first posted about a studio visit with John Henry Donner, and nearly a year since the original visit. The building where I saw his work is now desolate and empty, and the students have moved to a new location in Tribeca. I saw Donner at the recent open studios and it reminded me that I have yet to write about his work that was "new" in early 2013.

 What struck me in this work was how it has been completely transformed, how its emphasis and its materials had shifted from a constructed reality to an excavated one. Maybe that sounds like code for something but it isn't. Just look at my photographs. 

 Donner is still making things, but the emphasis on structure has been supplanted by a reckoning with materials, and the only structure that is evident takes its cues directly from nature. His new objects are made by amassing a pure material, wrapping it in another material, and then ripping them both apart to reveal the overt and the hidden simultaneously.