About this episode
Fred Tomaselli has shown his work in museums, biennials and galleries around the world, including MoMA, MoCA, the MET and SFMoMa. Biennials include the Whitney Biennial, Berlin Biennial, and the Lyon Biennial. Solo museum shows include the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris, The Aspen Art Museum, The Brooklyn Art Museum, and the Orange County Art Museum. Tomaselli is known for his intricate, engulfing images of earthly and cosmic realms made by suspending collage and painted imagery as well as an unorthodox array of real-world materials in thick layers of clear, epoxy resin. These works on wood panels mix snippets of botanical, ornithological and anatomical illustrations cut from books and magazines, prescription pills, medicinal herbs and psychoactive plants with the artist’s own designs. Tomaselli sees his mixture of psychedelic imagery and substances as windows into hallucinatory universes: “It is my ultimate aim to seduce and transport the viewer into the space of these pictures while simultaneously revealing the mechanics of that seduction.” He and Zuckerman discuss a shared love of nature, what art can do, what drugs and birding have in common, the shelf life of art, altering perception and dislocated, settling for oblivion, nocturnal experiences, community, a sample choir, and AI!