Checking out
Fred Tomaselli , the artist who's work is featured on the cover of Laura's album, I was interested to see there is an exhibit of his work on here in Dublin.
http://www.modernart.ie/en/page_72398.htm
I went to see it today and very interesting it was , including images like this -
Untitled, 2000, Photocollage, acrylic, leaves, pills, insects, resin on wood panel, 84 x 120 inches
I didn't spot the detail used on Laura' cover ; hopefully all will be told when the album is released.
Here's a write up from todays papers -
The Sunday Times , March 27 '05
American artist Fred Tomaselli’s use of drugs makes for psychedelic art, says CRISTIN LEACH
Fred Tomaselli: a trip down memory lane
Fred Tomaselli turned to drugs in 1989. He had tried other things but they didn’t work. Everything around him in New York seemed to be decaying. The visionary quest, as he described it, of the 1970s counterculture was falling into ruins, with the legendary nightclub Studio 54 symbolising its decadence and failure. His personal life was crumbling around him as friends began to die of Aids. Tomaselli turned to pills.
First he reached for aspirin and bottles of Sudafed. He fixed them to wooden supports and sealed them in resin. Then he moved on to the harder stuff, entombing narcotics in resin.
Marijuana leaves from his garden also got the treatment; their organic quality appealed to him as a means of softening the geometric shapes of the pills. Gradually, Tomaselli found a way of moving on from the conventional art forms that had frustrated him, and in the process created something both druggy and entirely new.
At the age of 48, he has spent most of his adult life exploring the areas he first opened up in 1979. Once an installation artist, he now makes paint-collage hybrids that incorporate not only pills (prescription, over-the-counter and illegal) but also leaves and images cut from magazines and catalogues.
Monsters of Paradise, his show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, is a useful introduction to his psychedelic art and contains one authentic masterpiece, Doppelganger Effect, a two and a half metre square diptych made last year, which indicates that the Californian-born artist is at the height of his power.
That piece comprises countless overlapping strings of pills and leaves, cutout paper birds, flowers, mushrooms, human body parts and lots of painted dots. Together they add up to an explosion of love bead-style chains on a black background.
It combines undeniable visual energy with an exhilarating physical presence. It is a swinging, beaded entrance to an irresistible visual vortex.
The viewer wants to jump into it, but instead must remain content with gazing at its myriad elements. It’s an ultimate expression of the style that has made Tomaselli’s name a mind-altering, drug-fuelled experience without the dangers of ingestion.
Doppelganger Effect is one of 18 works included in the show, which marks the first appearance of Tomaselli’s work in Ireland. It appears to have made it past customs unhindered — unlike his 1994 experience, when a Paris show opened with empty walls, the paintings detained by officialdom — but then the drugs in Tomaselli’s collages are so irretrievably encased in layers of resin that sniffer dogs would have failed to identify the substances.
Despite his unorthodox materials and the psychedelic visual nature of his work, Tomaselli does not present himself as a particularly subversive figure. He stopped taking LSD in 1980, preferring these days to stoke himself up with caffeine and cigarettes. There are a couple of half pills in his Study for Gravity in Four Directions, which includes the antidepressant Prozac, but perhaps they came to him that way.
He gets his drugs by bulk ordering non-prescription remedies; the antidepressants, heart and diabetes medicines in his work include out-of-date stock and leftovers from friends; the rest, he says, come through anonymous donations.
His work owes a debt to both western Pop and Op Art movements and to eastern visual traditions including Tibetan Buddhist mandalas and Indian devotional art.
The many-armed dervish in a work called Metal Destroyer looks like a Hindu god, but the artist has also indicated its intended homage to Keith Moon from the Who.
Far from celebrating drug culture, Tomaselli argues his creations make sobering comment on the reality of many of his friends’ lives. Like specimens preserved in formaldehyde, his multicoloured pills offer a record of a human race that has become hooked, for better or worse, on chemical solutions to physical and mental problems.
His hyper-real landscapes may be visual manifestations of a drug-fuelled experience, but by encasing the constituent narcotics in layers of resin, Tomaselli also renders them inaccessible, at once destroying as he displays them.
As a career move the drug use smacks of gimmickry, but what makes Tomaselli more than a one-trick pony is not only the undeniable beauty and technical skill in his work but also a marked continual progression. He made his first drug-based work in 1989; these days the pills aren’t so important.
Tomaselli has recently shifted his focus from drugs to body parts, introducing the human figure into his celestial landscapes. Almost half the works in the show are figurative, with bodies formed from paper clippings that range from porn magazine genitalia to intestines and brains cut from anatomical guides.
A multitude of smaller body parts — along with snakes, insects, birds, flowers and more — make up each human form. The naked body is a traditional subject of beauty in art, but Tomaselli’s bodies are more than naked. They are skinless, flayed, giving them a nightmarish quality despite their cosmic surroundings.
The figures bring into sharper focus the utopia/dystopia element that has been central to his pill works. These new collages balance a human yearning for transcendence with a real-life tendency towards chaos and painful extremes. The male figure in Expecting To Fly falls to Earth as many hands reach up to catch him and the pit becomes a 21st-century arena for Icarus’s ancient tale of human aspiration and failure. As if the almost overwhelming detail was not enough, Tomaselli throws curve balls, such as the tiny figure of Hitler among the toys in Toytopia, a portrait of his infant son.
He also plays jokes that it takes a second to get. The birds in Passerines Finches and Passerines White Eyes have had their feathers replaced with cutouts from clothing catalogues: zippers take the place of beaks, fleece meets waterproof where wing should meet underbelly. It turns out that the birds are wearing the anoraks by which their human watchers are generally identified.
He plays heavily on the relationship between drug taking and the centuries-old concept of art as a window on to another reality. And yet, although he tempts his viewers with visions of paradise, he barely conceals the monsters that lurk there.
Encasing it all is the thick resin seal that adds to the jewel-like quality of each piece, making the surface of the works translucent yet impenetrable. This seal also gives them a uniquely plastic, manufactured feel that is at odds with their handmade, labour-intensive origins. It’s an interesting dichotomy for a boy who grew up in Santa Monica, with Hollywood and Disneyland nearby constantly blurring the line between reality and fantasy. Tomaselli claims to have searched for the hidden plumbing the first time he saw a real waterfall.
There are those for whom all this will add up to nothing more than decorative excess. To others the works may offer the kind of portal on to the otherworldliness they seem to promise. This artist invites viewers to get lost in his world, and indeed we might.
In America, those who got up in arms about Tomaselli’s use of drugs worried that addicts might attempt to chip the pills out of the works. Their argument for some kind of health warning doesn’t really hold, but if there is to be one, it should be not to look for too long. Just in case.
Fred Tomaselli: Monsters of Paradise is at Imma, Dublin, until June 19