Tamara Johnson’s exhibition House Salad at Lora Reynolds Gallery in Austin examines the absurdity of daily domesticity with mass-produced kitchen items turned into one-of-a-kind sculptures.
Tamara Johnson: House Salad
July 8–Sept 2, 2023
Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin
In Tamara Johnson’s solo exhibition, House Salad, kitchen colanders become the ultimate object d’art, meticulously fabricated and hand-painted to mimic the vintage enamelware of yesteryear. Johnson’s kitschy colanders scream garage-sale bargain, but don’t let their well-worn facades fool you: her sculptures are imposters, made from materials that bear little connection to the objects themselves.
Each bowl—a combination of Hydrocal gypsum and fiberglass—has been cast and painted with such verisimilitude, that the trompe l’oeil of their chipped patina may go entirely unnoticed. The scratched metal surface of Colander with Sponge and Clip (2021), for instance, is silver leaf; the bright yellow sponge affixed to the colander’s side…Hydrocal. The purple hair clip clamped to its basin? Resin.
Johnson, a Waco native now based in Dallas after living for some years in New York, started out as a painter before shifting into sculpture. Pulling from both backgrounds, her handmade readymades playfully question the true function (or value) of any given object. Each sculptural composition, embellished with miscellaneous household items, is as formal as it is whimsical.
Despite the utilitarian nature of a food strainer, there is something quite bodily about these seven forms. Four are presented convexly in the gallery—a pregnancy of sorts—while the remaining three are invitingly concave. The two separate bodies of work (so to speak) were completed in 2021 and 2023, respectively, during which time Johnson had a child. But even as these bowls hint at the biographical, the artist seems more concerned with de-contextualizing their meaning.
The colanders are sparsely arranged throughout the gallery, as to create distance, not only from each other, but from their original purpose. Colander with Blonde Bobby Pins (2021) is the only vessel placed on a table rather than a wall. But alas, its face-down position, randomly strewn with gilded hairpins, ensures that nothing is getting rinsed anytime soon.
Three additional, much smaller sculptures—referencing some of the colanders’ accessories—can also be spotted in the space: an ersatz saltine perched high on one wall, a faux deviled egg placed low on another, a piece of blue painter’s tape stuck to a hallway. Forever Blue Tape #1 (2023), which is in fact made of Tyvek and gouache, remains unassumingly tout seul, in grave danger of being mistaken as a leftover scrap from the show’s installation.
House Salad contains a bowlful of commentary around familiarity and domesticity, what holds true and what gets chipped away. But why colanders and not, say, cutting boards? “I was thinking about filtration devices, how some things are allowed to pass through while others aren’t,” says Johnson.
What gets through is a philosophical question about what’s real and what’s fake. The answer, naturally, has a lot of holes.
