February 6th to June 6th 2010
The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College
815 North Broadway
Saratoga Springs, NY 12866-1632

October 8, 2010 to January 2, 2011
The Brooklyn Museum
Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, 5th Floor
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000

In the late 1960s Alan Watts, the British philosopher and writer who introduced many Westerners to the tenets of Eastern Philosophy, experimented with psychedelic drugs. He noted the four main characteristics of his experiences ingesting cannabis, LSD, and psilocybin (magic mushrooms), and one of them stood out when I was looking at Fred Tomaselli’s work. What Watts calls an “awareness of relativity” is present throughout the paintings/collages in this exhibition. Tomaselli does not deal with individual entities in his work. He deals with the chain of being. Single figures are constructed out of a multiplicity of body parts, and repetitions of various types of organic life and manufactured chemical substances cohere into imaginary shapes and lines of energy. Microscopic and celestial forms commingle and the outside and inside of the human body is depicted simultaneously. For Tomaselli there are no boundaries between interiority and exteriority.

The inclusion of real objects such as hemp leaves, a large variety of pills and capsules, magic mushrooms, saccharine tablets, and carefully trimmed photographic material, injects an element of the real into these two dimensional images, and for those viewers who have used any of the illicit drugs Tomaselli includes in his work, the drug taking experience, which includes the transformation or deformation of the senses, is recalled in an intense way. Like all great art should do, drugs like cannabis, LSD, and psilocybin, can make us see things differently in a permanent sense. In Tomaselli’s painting Expulsion (2000), which includes direct references to Masaccio’s fresco, The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Tomaselli imagines the godhead as a magic mushroom cap. In the painting psilocybin is the creator of worlds, or taxonomies. We see a magic mushroom/sun/god shape with linear beams shooting out of it in all directions. The energy or light beams consist of a wild assortment of human body parts, pills, flora and fauna, insects, leaves, and birds. Tomaselli, like in much of his work, seamlessly blends human anatomy and nature as well as the products of industrial processes. Small individual units coalesce into an abstract energy or entity. This transformation of individual units into larger gestalts is a good metaphor for the painting process.

Whether or not Tomaselli still smokes pot or takes ‘shrooms is irrelevant. His paintings are about the transformation of reality through the imagination, and the imagination relies on the orderly and rational process of creating taxonomies and the intuitive process of discovering ideas and forms through the working process. So these paintings are not designs, or planned beforehand. They all include the backdrop of the void or death or entropy, depending on your world view. This is manifested in the ever present black backgrounds. These are reminders that the energy of the universe fluctuates, flickers, is reborn and snuffed out over and over again.

Life as multiplicity, or the blending of all into one, is dramatically portrayed in paintings such asFungi and Flowers (2002) and Field Guides (2003). The human figures in these paintings consist of profuse and varied body parts, insects, and floral forms. Body parts are interchangeable; a heel of a foot is really a clenched hand. There are multiple versions of every body part. So the individual literally contains multitudes. In Tomaselli’s map paintings, such as Desert Bloom (2000), we have a bird’s eye view of an imaginary terrain. Recognizable architectural forms are spread throughout the composition, barns, churches, homes, but the surface of these familiar objects are placed on is fractal like, psychedelically colored, or spider web like. Tomaselli is juxtaposing the familiar with the visionary in a seamless fashion, utilizing the omniscient bird’s eye view. The contrasting perspectival views used in these map paintings, the architectural forms are depicted as if the viewer was seeing them on the ground plane and the abstract landscape they are placed on is flat and portrayed in bird’s eye view, is disorienting. Tomaselli’s work celebrates the creative aspects of being disoriented.

Tomaselli’s linear abstractions are quintessential Maximalist paintings. They combine human and nature, and they are incredibly busy. In paintings such as Echo, Wow, and Flutter (2000), swirling, overlapping lines, consisting of an assortment of eyes and hands and leaves, various pharmaceuticals, flowers, insects, and painted images of bugs and butterflies and shapes that mimic pill and capsule shapes turn in on one another in endless repetitions of elliptical movements. The lines and the shapes they form and contain suggest events that take place beyond the visible spectrum. Like all of Tomaselli’s work they engage the viewer’s eyes and brain in different ways when they are looked at up close and from a distance.

His painting technique is very tight and detailed. It is all in the wrist. There are no large gestures or expressionist brushwork. It relates just as much to the art of pin-striping as it does to the meticulous brushwork found in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. The painterly passages that get embedded in between layers of resin are fragmented and spread across the painting surface in an asymmetrical way. Tomaselli intentionally tries to confuse our perceptions of painted and collage forms, and this underscores the notion that perceptions can be deceiving. But instead of just pointing out the subjectivity of our sense perceptions he celebrates the generative powers of looking.

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Three years ago, Banners of Persuasion, a London-based arts organization, commissioned thirteen artists to design tapestries.  Artwork was then sent to a workshop in China to be woven by a team of experts.  The results, on display at the James Cohan Gallery, could not be more diverse.  Indeed, without the consistent medium, almost nothing seems to hold these works together visually.

While many prominent artists have used tapestry to their advantage (William Kentridge and Chuck Close come to mind) some pieces in this show are less suited than others to this particular translation of this medium.  That the artist never touched the object seems out of sync with the hand-heavy quality of these kinds of weavings.

The most interesting works were those in which tapestry added a level of meaning to the image.  Kara Walker’s A Warm Summer Evening in 1863 (2008) depicts a large black silhouette of a hanged female figure against a background of rioting masses and burning buildings.  Although it is a black and white image, it calls to mind the richness of Renaissance weavings in its composition and story-telling ability.  It is completely stunning in a way that a charcoal drawing or a photograph cannot match.

Fred Tomaselli’s After Migrant Fruit Thugs (2008) and Shahzia Sikander’s Pathology of Suspension (2008) are both enriched by making reference to the history of Middle Eastern weaving.  In Tomaselli’s work, two large birds, depicted with every feather colorfully articulated, sit in a tree amidst a starry nighttime sky.  The use of flat space and the decorative, stylized depiction of the birds, branches and stars harkens back to Middle Eastern pictorial rugs.  Sikander, whose work references Moghul craft traditions, uses a border motif, floral patterns and a strong, if off-centered, red rectangle typically seen in traditional Persian or Oriental rugs.

Grayson Perry’s Vote Alan Measles for God (2008) stands out as the only work that makes reference to war rugs.  These highly collected weavings started to appear in Afghanistan in the 1980’s and included images of bombs, tanks and guns.  Perry’s piece has a decidedly folk-art feel—the crooked writing along the border, the crowed cacophony of images, religious references.  Central to the image is a giant red Gumby-like character standing atop the twin towers waving an M16.  His body is strapped with a bomb, filled with grenades, and he’s surrounded by coffins, Osama Bin Laden, car bombs, fighter planes, crosses, dollar signs, images from Abu Ghraib and more.  It manages to be at once marvelously wacky and terrifying.

In Francesca Lowe’s Trump (2008), a mushroom cloud is a swirl of exploding body parts, thrusting feet and fists.  Clouds and smoke erupt from the central figure in an apocalyptic, almost religious ecstasy. The deep space, the rich color palate and the otherworldliness make the image compelling.  However, one has to imagine that the experience of looking at the tapestry and the original painting would not be much different.  As with other works in this show, one is left to wonder what the sheer amount of labor that went into its creation was ultimately for.

The post Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists at James Cohan Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

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David Carrier, Martha Schwendener and Linda Yablonsky joined David Cohen to review Fred Tomaselli at James Cohan, Sarah Moris at Lever House, Cory Arcangel at Team, and Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner and Zwirner and Wirth.

The post November 2006: David Carrier, Martha Schwendener, and Linda Yablonsky with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.