The Dreamweaver

Tomaselli’s 2007 “Summer Swell”The Dreamweaver
Fred Tomaselli
Aspen Art Museum
Saturday, August 1, 2009

Fred Tomaselli earned street cred early on from his involvement in the underground punk and new wave music scene in 70s LA when his drawings were published in Slash (fanzine), an LA punk rock magazine. He emerged as an installation and performance artist with Paul McCarthy and other California artists in the 1980s. Living along the Pacific, surfboards were his vehicles for escape and the use of resin became a familiar medium in his artwork. His interests in drug culture made its way into the work as he yearned to create “sublime experiences” in reaction to the “theme parks and dislocated realities” he experienced growing up in Southern California. He moved east in 1986, settling into a studio in the then dodgy Williamburg neighborhood and turned to painting as a window to another reality. Over the years Tomaselli has carefully assembled an archive, an herbarium of sorts, containing weed, plants, pills, speed, insects, flowers, birds, and anatomical illustrations carefully cut from books and digital scans that he pulls from to create baroque paintings that draw upon a range of art historical sources and decorative traditions—like quilts and mosaics. Combining these unusual materials and paint under layers of clear epoxy resin, his paintings explode in mesmerizing patterns that appear to grow organically across his compositions in a multilayered coexistence of the real, the photographic, and the painterly. It would be perfectly fitting that his largest museum survey exhibition to date--featuring a curated selection of his two-dimensional works from the late 1980s to present would be held in Aspen where the drug culture burgeoned in the late 50s ushering in the hippie culture of the 60s when tripped out kids in Aspen celebrated the 1967 Summer of Love experience that Hunter S. Thompson dubbed “wild and incredible dopey.” It was doubly-fitting that the after party for his opening was held at the Aspen home of Lucy Sharp Dikeou whose monogram LSD was ticked along the cocktail napkins.

Fred Tomaselli was organized by the Aspen Art Museum, the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, and co-curated by AAM Director and Chief Curator Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson and Ian Berry, Associate Director and Malloy Curator at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. Tomaselli is also the first artist to be simultaneously represented in a solo exhibition at the AAM and celebrated as an Aspen Award for Art honoree. He will be the subject of a new monograph by Prestel Publishing to be released on September 1, 2009. Edited by Ian Barry, the book will feature an extended conversation between the artist and Barry, and scholarly essays by Zuckerman Jacobson and others. It will also include an excerpt from an unpublished work by David Shields, best-selling author of The Thing About Life is that One Day You’ll Be Dead.

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