Get Me, Don’t Get Me
Tamara Johnson
August 23 – September 27, 2025
Opening – Saturday August 23, 5-8pm
Keijsers Koning is pleased to present Tamara Johnson’s first solo exhibition with the gallery titled Get Me, Don’t Get Me. Johnson is known for transforming everyday household objects into unexpected sculptural moments that blur the line between mundane routine and profound emotion. In her new series of sculptures, she elevates the detritus of domestic life into poignant meditations on labor, care, and desire. The works have a push/pull tension, inherent in Johnson's work, simultaneously inviting understanding through familiarity, while maintaining an enigmatic quality that resists easy interpretation. These objects relay our most private moments—our anxieties around maintenance, our small pleasures, our daily rituals of survival. Her sculptures suggest what Johnson calls "a tactile archaeology of contemporary life"—physical evidence of the emotional landscapes we navigate through the simplest acts of daily existence.
Drawing from a vocabulary of ubiquitous consumer culture, Johnson's playful shifts in scale and substance reframe notions of value and permanence. The resulting works are at once tender and irreverent, functioning as metaphors for the blurred boundaries between care, consumption, and the absurdities of domestic ritual. A pewter can of fruit cocktail sheds its label while a cake presents itself for consumption atop a bronze cast monobloc chair. The works embody a permanent monument to this invisible labor; visitors avoid a scattering of pewter goldfish crackers so they may view a painted aluminum plate with children’s play food; bread and strawberry. Johnson continues her exploration of how humor and poignancy coexist in material transformations that reveal the overlooked poetry of contemporary life.
Tamara Johnson received her BFA from University of Texas, Austin, TX and her MFA in Sculpture from RISD. While living in New York, she worked as the studio assistant to Robert Gober, returning to Dallas to teach and initiate Sweet Pass Sculpture Park (an outdoor, nonprofit sculpture park with rotating exhibitions). Currently, Johnson is an Assistant Professor and Sculpture Area Head at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX.
Johnson has exhibited her work regularly throughout the US and internationally, including Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Saint Louis Art Museum, MO; NYC Parks & Recreation Department, NY; The Second Act Gallery, UK; CUE Art Foundation, NY; Wave Hill Art Center, NY; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY; Plexus Projects, NY; International Objects, NY; Fort Worth Modern Museum, TX; the Blanton Museum of Art, TX; ; ; Lora Reynolds Gallery, TX; William Shearburn Gallery, MO; Jonathan Hopson Gallery, TX; Keijsers Koning, TX; Material Art Fair, Mexico City ’25 (Keijsers Koning Booth). Her awards and recognitions include the 2023 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow, MO; 2022 Moss/Chumley Award, Meadows Museum of Art, TX; National Endowment (NEA) for the Arts Grant, D.C; the Brooklyn Arts Council Grant, NY; NARS Foundation, NY; The Santo Foundation, MO. In 2025, she was commissioned by the City of Austin’s Art in Public Places (AIPP) for the Elisabet Ney Museum, Austin, TX. In 2027, she will have a solo show at Women and Their Work in Austin, TX.
