Fred Tomaselli Speaks
In honor of the re-dedication celebration of Steinberg Hall on Washington University’s campus, Fred Tomaselli gave a lecture about his life and work. Tomaselli had been asked to speak by his gallery owner James Cohan, an alumnus of Washington University.
Tomaselli began in school by studying painting, but felt that the pressure of its art historical lineage was more than he could live up to. As a result, he spent several years exploring sculptural forms. Several of his works became interactive pieces requiring the viewer to be an active participant in the work. For example, in his piece, “Box for Your Head”, the viewer is required to insert their head into a hole, covered by the neck of a T-shirt, in a wooden box that is hung on the wall. The viewer is rewarded for this action by a view of an alternate reality, outer space.
His talk framed his work within the context of his life-long experience and interests.
For example, as a teenager, he and his skater friends went to see a James Turrell exhibition. In the show was a black rectangle that he and his friends scoffed at. Tomaselli had the audacity to go up and touch the surface of the piece, except that his hand continued through what he thought was the surface into empty space. His perspective went from one of mockery to complete amazement. The experience started a fascination with the idea of the “double-take”; something that he strives for in his work.
In his current practice Tomaselli has returned to painting. The majority of his work is large scale, at least six feet by eight feet, although he has branched into some smaller pieces. He creates his paintings by suspending things in layers of resin over a black surface in order to create a larger 
image. This process allows him to include a myriad of things into his pieces. He includes everything from pills, to pressed flowers and leaves, paper cut-outs, and painted marks. The individual parts that make up the large scale images are always ant-like in comparison to the gestalt image. The shift in scale creates a sense of multiple realities within his pieces. There is the world of the larger image, and the world of the minute detail of the individual pieces, and their relationship to each other as they are suspended in the resin layers, casting shadows on one another.
This concept of distorted, or displaced reality, was discussed heavily in his talk. He described growing up near Disneyland and absorbing the created reality of the theme park into part of his consciousness. This, along with his extensive involvement with drug culture over the years, has made him understand the world as many spheres of reality.
Tomaselli did little to impress those the event was held in honor of, or perhaps those of a more refined sensibility. He spoke plainly of his drug involvement and its relationship to his work, and often seemed to have difficulty stringing sentences together. The informal and mildly incoherent moments in the talk managed to give the event a slightly awkward and inconsistent air, but the suspended layers of resin remained effective, even in photographic form, in capturing this audience member’s imagination.
