Fred Tomaselli at the Brooklyn Museum

On the first Saturday of our staycation in New York, Jenn and I set out for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden but ended up stopping for coffee at the little cafe in the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum.

Descriptions of the Fred Tomaselli show at the museum focused on his use of pills embedded in resin, which didn’t interest me much. But I did like the Big Raven image used to promote the show, and since we were there we thought we would take a look.

The exhibit turned out to be one of the high points of our time off. Tomaselli’s highly intricate work has been compared to traditional Indian painting, but with its emphasis on birds and eyes, its obsessive detail, and its use of mysterious halos and energy waves, it reminds me of the psychotic art (including this series of cat pictures, done by an increasingly disturbed artist) that I first saw in a book that I read as a child. I remember it being called The Time-Life Book of the Mind but can’t locate it on the Internet. (Tomaselli himself seems quite sane in his interviews.)

A feature of Tomaselli’s collages that doesn’t come through in reproduction is the way in which one element of a man or bird is built up from many smaller images of the same thing. The beak of a bird will be composed of many smaller beaks of many shapes and sizes, and a snake (as in the image pictured) looks as if it has swallowed a reptile house full of tinier snakes.