You don’t need a ticket to get into her art shows, because she already has plenty.
For most New Yorkers, the sight of an orange parking ticket causes distress, anger and usually both — but all Orianne Cosentino sees is a future masterpiece.
“They’re just such an iconic piece of New York City design,” said the Queens native who has integrated thousands of discarded tickets into more than 200 acrylic paintings and drawings of Big Apple cityscapes.
“I just made it my business to, whenever I saw them in the street, no matter how gross and waterlogged and messed up they were, I would just be like, ‘I’m taking them.'”
As a student at the School of Visual Arts in the ’90s, Cosentino, 46, started collecting the abandoned tickets. At the time, she and her fellow students would scour the city in search of raw materials for their art.
“We were scavengers, like, collecting stuff all the time,” she said. “And there were all these parking tickets. So I was like, ‘I’m just going to collect these and figure out something to do with them that would be cool.'”
She waited 10 years before she did anything with her stockpile of tickets — friends still donate — which come from all five boroughs, some with furious sentiments scrawled upon them.
“There’s one and it’s got a note to the cops, but it’s in Spanish. It’s like, ‘You and your collaborators, go to hell,'” she said. “Actually, it says something much worse than that, but I’ll spare you.”
Her process begins at her Long Island City art studio, with one of the photos she’s snapped of a Gotham scene. Then, she lays a foundation by gluing down the tickets.
“Sometimes I find a rip, sometimes they’re really bulky with texture,” she said. “And whatever it is, I’ll just scatter them all over.”
She incorporates her own parking tickets — which she promised she pays — into her labors of love.
“Sometimes I realize I’m using a ticket from an old car ticketed on a former block I’ve lived on,” she said.
Once she has an abstract composition, she references the photo’s image and starts painting or drawing.
In many instances, the work takes on a life of its own.
“A lot of times, it’s a surprise,” she said. “It will have a grid right where there’s windows or it will have orange right where there’s a reflection of the sun.”
Although most of her work is done by painting on canvas or wood, she also creates drawings on paper.
Cosentino, who works by day as a private chef, has sold her pieces at art shows, in cafes and online through her website and Instagram account. Prices range from $200 to $3,000 based on size.
Her ticket collection, which she named “Quota,” began after a crackdown on illegal street artists, street musicians and vendors in the ’90s.
“As artists, the thing that we thought was the most detrimental … all these people that made New York City culture so special,” she said.