TAMARAJOHNSON

FEBRUARY 13 – MARCH 23, 2016

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TAMARAJOHNSON

NO YOUR BOUNDARIES

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23, 2016

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BOARD OF DIRECTORSTheodore S. BergerSanford BiggersThomas G. DevineThomas K.Y. Hsu Vivian KuanCorina LarkinBrian D. StarerGregory Amenoff, Emeritus

STAFF Dena MullerExecutive Director

Beatrice Wolert-WeeseDeputy Director

Shona Masarin-HurstPrograms Manager

Justin AllenPrograms Assistant

ADVISORY COUNCILPolly ApfelbaumKatie CerconeLynn CrawfordIan CooperMichelle GrabnerEleanor Heartney Trenton Doyle HancockPablo HelgueraPaddy JohnsonDeborah KassSharon LockhartRossana MartinezJuan SánchezIrving SandlerLilly WeiAndrea Zittel

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CUE Art Foundation is a dynamic visual arts center dedicated to creating essential career and educational opportunities for emerging artists of all ages. Through exhibitions, arts education, and public programs, CUE provides artists and audiences with sustaining and meaningful experiences and resources.

CUE’s exhibition program aims to present new and exceptionally strong work by under-recognized and emerging artists based in the United States, and is committed to exhibiting work of all media, genres, and styles from artists of all ages.

This exhibition is a winning selection from the 2015-16 Open Call for Solo Exhibitions. The proposal was unanimously selected by a jury comprised of panelists Cecilia Alemani, Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art; Renaud Proch, Executive Director of Independent Curators International (ICI); and Rujeko Hockley, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing the exhibition.

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TAMARA JOHNSON

I work to tease out potent meaning from overlooked fragments of the home, ordinary nuances of exterior architecture and un-monumental mishaps of a place. Through sculpture, performance and installation, my work utilizes a wide range of materials—from pigmented silicone rubbers to concrete—to recreate underutilized objects and situations into venues for participation and contemplation. Always teetering on the border between the tragic and humorous, my work takes what we know as familiar, such as a water hose, and distorts its function into an uncanny fossil of the real.

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ARTIST BIOTamara Johnson was born in Waco, Texas in 1984. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007 and the Rhode Island School of Design with a sculpture MFA in 2012. Her work is a mash-up of sculptural making, choreographic landscapes and performative actions in the public/nonpublic. Most recently, Johnson has exhibited her work at Wave Hill in the Bronx, NY; Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY; The Lot LIC, Long Island City, NY; Judith Charles Gallery, New York, NY; Rooster Gallery, New York, NY; Microscope Gallery, NUTUREart and Black Ball Projects, all in Brooklyn, NY; Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Staten Island, NY; CR10 Arts, Hudson, NY; Eastfield College Gallery in Dallas, TX; Find & Form Space in Boston, MA and Philip Bloom Gallery in Nantucket, MA. Johnson’s Backyard Pool, 2014, was honored at the Public Art Network Year in Review 2015. This is Johnson’s first solo show in New York.

SPECIAL THANKSSpecial Thanks to CUE Art Foundation staff for all your help and support and to Renaud Proch, Sara Roffino, Brian and Tammy Johnson, Janet Zweig, RG Studio, DH McNabb, Rachel Klinghoffer, Leopold Masterson, Phoebe Streblow, Kate Wignall, James Foster, Jason Rabie, Cristóbal Céa, Claudia Bitran, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

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RENAUD PROCH

There are talks of making America Great Again. We hear of Big Beautiful Walls. There are Dreams. Dreamers. American Dreams. There is an American Dream that is dying, we are told. It is on its deathbed, with a pale, white, sunken, lonely face on; awaiting the doctor. Or is it too late? Has the picketed fence given way to the Great Wall? Is the Dream already dead; awaiting another type of dream: resurrection and eternal life?

The messengers trumpeting the news are many. They speak in biblical terms and metaphors that are less than precise, leaving us to decipher the meaning behind the symbols. The spectacle is slapstick and abject. It oozes cream cheese frosting. We are once more peering through the cracks of Martha Stewart’s kitchen walls and garden fences.

The work of Tamara Johnson is rooted in considerations of American suburban symbolism, its powers and contradictions. With great meticulousness and a singular sense of humor, she seduces, engages, questions. In 2014, at the Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, Johnson created a swimming pool in a space otherwise occupied by a parking lot. Turning asphalt into a vision of leisure, Johnson’s sculpture was only a mirage. All the architectural details of a suburban yard pool were faithfully recreated, but instead of a body of water, the pool’s edges enclosed a green expanse

CURATOR-MENTOR

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CURATOR BIORenaud Proch is Independent Curators International (ICI)’s Executive Director, and from December 2009 to March 2013, he served as ICI’s Deputy Director. Prior to this he was the Senior Director at the Project in New York, as well as the Director of MC, in Los Angeles. Originally from Switzerland, Proch studied in London, and moved to the West Coast of the U.S. in 2001. He co-founded ART2102 of Los Angeles in 2003; and the backroom in 2005 together with Kate Fowle and Magali Arriola. In 2011, he co-curated with Khwezi Gule a retrospective of South African artist Tracey Rose for the Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa, and the Umea Bildmuseet, Sweden, which also traveled to the Nikolaj Kunsthal, in Copenhagen, Denmark. He has lectured at Camberwell College and the Royal College of Art, in London; the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, in California; Umea University in Sweden; Witswatersrand University, and Cape Town University in South Africa; The New School, and the School of Visual Arts, in New York.

of grass. It failed to deliver on the desires generated by the simple mention of a pool in the city’s summer heat, but it opened up new spaces for dreaming and thinking.

At the CUE Art Foundation, the artist pairs two sculptural installations: There is a series of garden hoses that hang along the wall (a family of deformed trophies, absurd, abject, deviant, sensual… I spy: a cream cheese frosting covered hose…); and, in the space, a wood fence and a faux iron railing collide, merge, exchange DNA, and part again. In the process, they’ve lost their ways; they’ve failed to fully enclose. In their uselessness, they are reduced to their ancestral differences. Both are descendants of old American families. The railing hails from England. It lost the gilded spikes of its British cousins but still shares its pretense. Its role is not so much to divide as it is to serve as a status symbol, reminiscent of country estates reduced to 18th century London squares. The wooden fence is from another stock altogether. Less colonial, more colonizing; it bares the spirit of the pioneer settlers; simultaneously dividing, obscuring, enclosing, claiming and protecting.

Step into Johnson’s yard, with its props, replicas, prostheses! Laugh at those twisted, corrupt symbols that still hold so much power! Rejoice in the absurd, the frustrating, the tragic before stepping back into reality!

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ABOVE and OPPOSITE

Water hose, Loop (2015)70” x 30” x 5” Rope, rubber, aluminum, plastic, pigment, oil-based paint.Photo credit: Phoebe Streblow.

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LEFT TO RIGHT

Water hose, Two Arcs, 201570” x 41” x 5”

Water hose, River Oaks, 201570” x 36” x 22”

Water hose, Live Strong, 201570” x 34” x 45”

Rope, rubber, aluminum, plastic, pigment, oil-based paint.Photo credit: Phoebe Streblow.

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ABOVE

Water hose, Two Arcs (detail), 201570” x 41” x 5”

OPPOSITE

Water hose, Live Strong (detail), 201570” x 34” x 45”

Rope, rubber, aluminum, plastic, pigment, oil-based paint.Photo credit: Phoebe Streblow.

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Water hose, Knot, 201520” x 11” x 19.5” Rope, rubber, aluminum, plastic, pigment, oil-based paint.Photo credit: Phoebe Streblow.

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OPPOSITE

Two Fences (Ridgewood), 201538” x 42” x 26”Wood, plastic, epoxy putty, latex paint.

ABOVE

Paper plate, 20159.25” x 9.25” x 2” Acid-free paper, graphite.

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Armadillo, 20155.5” x 5.5” x 6”Hydrocal gypsum, oil-based paint.

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Untitled; Water hoses, 2015Dimensions varied.Rope, silicone rubber, plastic, oil-based paint, tub.Philip Bloom Gallery, Nantucket, MA.Photo credit: Philip Bloom Gallery.

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An Interior Complex, 2015Dimensions varied.Gypsum plaster, epoxy putty, wood, foam, latex and acrylic paint.Sunroom Project Space, Wave Hill, Bronx, NY.

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An Interior Complex (detail), 2015Dimensions varied.Gypsum plaster, epoxy putty, wood, foam, latex and acrylic paint.Sunroom Project Space, Wave Hill, Bronx, NY.

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Backyard Pool, 201444’ x 26’ 5” x 26”Concrete, ceramic tile, aluminum, fiberglass, seed, acrylic paint.The Lot, Long Island City, NY.Presented by Socrates Sculpture Park and Rockrose Development Corporation.

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ABOUT ARMADILLOS AND OTHER TOPICS

SARA ROFFINO

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As a child growing up in Waco, Texas, Tamara Johnson moved between the private art classes in which her mother enrolled her—and to which she sported a beret—and the warehouse out of which her father ran a granite and tile company. “It was like his studio,” she explained in a late fall studio visit. “I hated going there, but I grew up like that. You have tools and you build stuff.” Some of Johnson’s anecdotes about her childhood in Waco evoke a carefree American idyll, though one memory that stands out is the 1993 FBI siege of the Branch Davidian cult’s headquarters just outside her hometown, which left 80 people dead. An underlying anxiety about place permeates Johnson’s practice as a sculptor.

If the challenge is to situate oneself within one’s present, the tools Johnson uses to do so are rope, silicon, paint and wood. It’s not hard to imagine

that the time she spent staving off boredom at the granite warehouse has contributed to her becoming a sculptor: It is through building objects, and parsing their material qualities and the significance of their existence, that Johnson negotiates her own space within the world. Based in New York City for the past three years, following undergraduate studies at University of Texas at Austin, three years in Texas and then an MFA at Rhode Island School of Design, Johnson is driven by an interest in the interplay between ideas of familiarity/unfamiliarity and interior/exterior and how they are experienced personally, as well as on a larger social scale.

Whereas Marcel Duchamp ascribed the title of “art” to common objects, and Claes Oldenburg re-created common objects at large scale, Johnson re-creates common objects and then places them within unfamiliar contexts. Take, for instance, her garden hoses. Familiar to all suburban Americans, they become foreign fossils when placed within an urban white-cube gallery. While the hoses appear malleable, like Oldenburg’s soft sculptures, in reality they are fixed, frozen by internal metal armatures, as if time was paused while the hose was transported 2,000 miles from the Waco backyard where it belongs. In a late fall studio visit, Johnson described adjusting to life in New York City—a place vastly distant from her Texas home—as adjusting to a “loss of function.” It is a sensation expressed in her work. “This idea of making the

Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not,I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me,I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,I too had receiv’d identity by my body,That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my body.

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

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unfamiliar familiar is very much how I feel about living in New York,” she said. “It’s a struggle to feel comfortable here. I just don’t feel normal.”

Johnson’s Fence with Grass similarly captures this sentiment, going beyond mere representation of the experience of displacement to challenge her own history and sense of the familiar. In this work she opposes Gaston Bachelard’s notion that “outside and inside form a dialectic of division.” Through the weaving together of a wooden fence from her childhood street and a wrought iron fence of the sort that demarcates the barrier between public street and private residence in New York City, Johnson hints at a continuum stretching between these divided states. The private history of her childhood fence is brought into a larger context where its previous significance becomes merely one layer within many layers of history. And with the motorized grass-bot continually banging into the wooden fence, Johnson captures the impossibility of escaping from the past. While the fence brought from Waco is left raw, the stoop fence is painted to replicate the texture of homes and fences in New York, where a continuous cycle of families moves into and out of the same spaces, painting the same walls and wrought iron gates over and over. The personal, or interior, memories of these locales—the dent in the wall from the lamp that fell or the vestige of green paint visible beneath the layers of red—are the result of specific actions that become indistinguishable from the collective, or exterior, experiences of these objects and places. Linking one bare fence and one heavily painted, Johnson suggests the fluidity between inside and outside, private and

public, familiar and unfamiliar, while reinforcing a sense of permanence present in one’s past.

Tucked off to the side of the fence is a cast hydrocal gypsum and fiberglass armadillo. Johnson says Texans see armadillos the way New Yorkers see rats: both animals are disgusting and ubiquitous. It may be a surprise, then, that the presence of the armadillo solidifies the exhibition as a form of self-portraiture. Johnson calls the creature—which can recoil within its scaly shell for protection when scared—her spirit animal. With its exterior armature, the armadillo counters the other, physically and symbolically vulnerable works on view, offering a metaphorical manifestation of Johnson’s examination of interior and exterior. The hoses are constructed of aluminum, which is covered in rope and silicon and then painted, leaving them dependent upon an internal structure for support. The armadillo, on the other hand, has an external structure that offers protection and safety in spaces that are unfamiliar and threatening.

As French Romantic writer, historian, and diplomat François-René de Chateaubriand wrote, “Every man carries within himself a world made up of all that he has seen and loved, and it is to this world that he returns, incessantly.” Johnson’s exhibition is evidence of the timelessness of these words and a reminder to us that alienation, and a yearning for home are in fact universal.

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This essay was written as part of the Young Art Critics Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season. For additional arts-related writing, please visit on-verge.org.

Writer Sara Roffino is a writer, editor, and graduate student based in New York City. Following undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she taught literacy skills in a NYC public high school while earning a master’s degree in education. Sara was a Fulbright scholar in Portugal in 2009–10. Since returning from Europe, she has worked at the Brooklyn Rail, as the managing editor, and at Art+Auction magazine, where she is currently a senior editor. Sara is also studying for a master’s degree in art history at Hunter College, and working as a research assistant for the art historian Barbara Rose.

Mentor Nancy Princenthal is a New York-based critic and former Senior Editor of Art in America; other publications to which she has contributed include Artforum, Parkett, the Village Voice, and The New York Times. Her book Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames and Hudson) was published in June 2015. She is also the author of Hannah Wilke (Prestel, 2010), and her essays have appeared in monographs on Shirin Neshat, Doris Salcedo, Robert Mangold and Alfredo Jaar, among many others. She is a co-author of two recent books on leading women artists, including The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium (Prestel, fall 2013). Having taught at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Princeton University; Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design, Montclair State University and elsewhere, she is currently on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts.

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CUE Art Foundation’s operations and programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, corporations, government agencies, individuals, and its members.

MAJOR PROGRAMMATIC SUPPORT PROVIDED BYAgnes Gund

Anholt Services (USA) Inc.

CAF American Donor Fund

Compass Group Management LLC

Compass Diversifi ed Holdings

The Joan Mitchell Foundation

Lenore Malen and Mark Nelkin

The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc.

William Talbot Hillman Foundation

New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council

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All artwork © Tamara Johnson. Catalogue design by Shona Masarin-Hurst.

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