"Currents 123: Tamara Johnson"
Currents 123: Tamara Johnson
Saint Louis Art Museum, St Louis, MO
On view April 5 - September 22, 2024
Tamara Johnson is known for her witty, hypernaturalistic sculptures depicting ubiquitous household objects, from colanders, hair clips, and garden hoses to an array of buffet treats, brought together in improbable, incisive assemblages. Her handcrafted objects are shaped from materials as varied as copper and concrete and then are meticulously painted to fool and delight the eye. Their exquisite surfaces—sheathed in silver leaf, coated with enamel, and brushed with diamond dust—both mask and accentuate their construction. The installations of Johnson’s sculpted items—seemingly plucked from a rummage sale, kitchen drawer or backyard—are weighted with a surreal, disquieting intimacy, a result as much of their uncanny juxtaposition and position within a gallery space as their improbable solidity.
For Currents 123, Johnson presents a new sculptural installation and video essay that explore the spaces in which familiar objects meet, permeate, and merge with the unseen systems of the body. The sculptures will be grouped together to create a 21st-century play on the traditional still life, slyly responding to histories of painting and sculpture.
Using the visual language of horror B movies and experimental soundscapes, the accompanying video work - a collaboration with artist Trey Burns - charts the slow obliteration of a female body as it dissolves into its surrounding environment. Exploring personal memory and experience through a wide range of media and cultural touch points, Johnson’s new work transforms banal gestures into new forms of material meaning, deftly wrangling slippery notions of femininity, sensuality, vulnerability, and humor.
Johnson is the recipient of the 2022–2023 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Fellowship, which included a residency at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and this exhibition.
