From the Artist: Tamara Johnson’s tickets more than silly relics of the past

In Currents 123: Tamara Johnson, the artist presents a new sculptural installation grouped together to create a 21st-century play on the traditional still life, slyly responding to histories of painting and sculpture. Johnson wrote the following blog post detailing her thinking and processes for creating the tickets on view in the exhibition. 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 & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and this exhibition. Currents 123 is on view through September 22 in Galleries 250 and 301. 

The first paper tickets got pinned to my studio wall in 2018 after moving from New York to Texas. I hung up each fragment with a thumb tack. One strip of three light blue drink tickets had an image of a frothy cartoon beer, and a longer strip that quickly sun-bleached from red to pink just said FREE. Thinking back now, I don’t remember where these came from, maybe an auction, maybe a dollar store. Fluttering on my studio wall, I enjoyed watching their transactional value dissipate over time—silly relics of a specific time and place.   

I gave birth to my daughter in November 2022. During my pregnancy, I allowed myself to eat as much coconut froyo as I wanted and binge on any female-led Netflix series, but overall, I was nauseous, tired, and uncomfortable. After she came out, my life exploded into a pile of joy, sleep deprivation, and back pain. My orientation to time shifted, and I began to feel a strong anxiety around how time was passing. I did the mortality math equations in my head: When she graduates high school, how old will I be? Will I be around when she is my age now?

At seven weeks postpartum, my husband and I uprooted our tiny family to St. Louis for a teaching fellowship at Washington University. We set up a make-shift life in a dorm-like apartment: a changing table on the office desk and a bottle sterilizing machine that took up all the kitchen counter space. As the seasons changed in St Louis from winter to spring, she grew from wiggling larva to a crawling grub, and I tried to not focus on how old I felt and how young she seemed.

We returned to Dallas, and I began to reorient back into my life and head. Back in the studio, I saw the tickets again with fresh eyes and felt a desire to remake them as a sculpture. Each copper ticket installed at SLAM represents a day I have been alive starting with my birthday, 092584. There were many prototypes and versions of the tickets that came before this version (linoleum-block–printed paper, hand-painted Tyvek paper, the list goes on), but a thin copper sheeting ended up the final material for its luster and its ability to hold a crimp. The copper also had a subtle sound, a high-pitched rustling only metal can produce. There’s also a sense of danger: copper sheeting slices through skin incredibly easy. I sanded the front and back surface with 600-grit sandpaper discs to prep it for a clear, matte varnish. This kept any oily fingerprints at bay.