Tomaselli Time

Last week’s visitor at the Penny W. Stamps Speaker Series was an artist named Fred Tomaselli. His work includes installations with fans and paper cups in grids, lines and designs made from rows of pills, compositions of leaves and pictures of birds cut out of field guides, all exploding in vast splaying patterns and colors, encased in resin, painted over, more resin – this year having published a book of gouache and collage paintings over scanned printouts of the front pages of the New York Times, aptly and simply titled The Times, which will be conveniently available for viewing at the University of Michigan Museum of art through January 25 - the visual disruptions responding to headlines, reflecting the news and happenings of Today.

What I really enjoyed about Tomaselli’s presentation of his work and ideas was the tone he went about explaining it all, chronologically, walking us through the development of form, content, and concept, all with the same casual lightheartedness that comes from (what I see as) a deep and profound sense of purpose, being completely at peace with his existence as a craftsman, a maker of images, an alchemist of visual data – the work existing as both a personal, compulsive, ritualistic act of synthesis, as well as a relevant collection of powerful imagery that wanders amidst topics of political and environmental and spiritual significance – stuff like the use and legality of pharmaceuticals and psychedelics, arranging these materials into lattices referencing folk art and the Eastern approach making images – he also likes birds, watching them and identifying them, and fly fishing, happily referring to himself as an “angler”, a cutter of lines through the air with rod, a reader of the particular river and ecosystem in which he casts his thoughts. His tedious process stems from experiences working at blue collar jobs, determined not to let the hours and days of working laborious jobs be a “complete waste of time”.

The rest I’d like to leave up to the work itself: