Mind-Altering Art

Take a quick look at the exhibition of art by Fred Tomaselli on view at Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica, and you’re apt to say to yourself, “I get it--this is about drugs.” Tomaselli, you see, creates pictures by painstakingly gluing actual hallucinogens, pharmaceutical drugs and marijuana leaves to wooden surfaces.

To say Tomaselli’s work is about drugs, however, is to give it a superficial reading. On a deeper level, his densely layered work is an exploration of 20th century methodologies of escape, ranging from stoner culture to Modernism.

“My work isn’t about drugs--it’s about perception and communication, and artists like James Turrell have been as important to me as head-shop art,” the 41-year-old artist says in an interview at the gallery. “I’ve used drugs as a material and subject matter in my work because I’m trying to communicate with people, and drugs are so deeply rooted in pop culture that they’re easily understood.

“I’m moving away from using drugs in the work, though, and very few are incorporated in the new pieces,” says the artist, who had an entire exhibition confiscated by French customs officers in 1994. “This show focuses instead on ways people impose ideologies onto nature in order to get it to support cultural ideals.

“For centuries people feared nature, but now everyone wants to love it--and in tromping en masse into the wilderness, we’re loving it to death,” he explains. “Many people still believe they can have an unsullied wilderness experience in a national park--which has as much to do with nature as a suburban garden or a theme park--and in attempting to find utopia, we’re creating dystopias.”

“Shack, Commune, Compound,” for instance, is a collaged painting that “incorporates images of American separatist housing, such as Shaker meeting halls, Thoreau’s cabin, hippie communes and Manson’s Spahn Ranch,” Tomaselli says of a piece in the show. “ ‘Quilt’ is a collaged figure of a man pieced together from images of synthetic outerwear clipped from catalogs for Lands’ End, Patagonia, L.L. Bean and so forth. I’m interested in the gear culture tourism has created and find it odd that we venture into nature swathed in petrochemically based, ultra-light synthetic clothing.”

‘My parents were Swiss immigrants who left Europe because they couldn’t make a living,” Tomaselli says. “My father was an Italian national whose family had been in Switzerland for three generations and still hadn’t been given citizenship. So he came to the U.S. in the early ‘50s, got a job as a draftsman and met my mom, who’s also Swiss and came here on a lark to work as a maid for a Hollywood producer.”

Tomaselli, who was born in 1956 in Santa Monica and raised in Santa Ana, is the oldest in a devout Catholic family of six children.

“Because my parents were immigrants, and I didn’t speak English until I was 5, I had an outsider mentality and didn’t fit in as a teenager. I was one of those artistic nerd kids who wasn’t good at sports, and growing up in a working-class neighborhood, that created problems.

“My father was always drawing and all the women on my mother’s side were Sunday painters, so my parents exposed me to art. But there was a heavy influx of pop culture too. Our house was so close to Disneyland that I could look through a pair of binoculars at night and see Tinkerbell fly across the sky from the tip of the Matterhorn, and I had a typical Southern California stoner, mall-rat adolescence. I was smoking pot and dropping acid from the time I was 14, and though I never had a drug problem, lots of my friends did.”

Tomaselli decided as a small boy that he wanted to be an artist, but his understanding of what that meant changed dramatically when he saw the 1973 Bruce Nauman retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“I didn’t know art could be such an immersive experience, and seeing that show completely changed the kind of artist I wanted to be,” Tomaselli recalls. “During that same period, I was regularly visiting an avant-garde gallery in Orange called 58F that always had something weird going on, and Chris Burden was doing the performances that launched his career. I remember my mother reading the Santa Ana Register and being completely outraged by a story about an artist [Burden] who had himself crucified on the back of a car. I’d never seen my mom that [angry], so that kind of art appealed to the rebellious teenager in me.”

After graduating from high school in 1974, Tomaselli spent a few years hitchhiking around the country. He worked on ranches, spent time in New Orleans and Vermont and lived for a year in Yosemite.

“I drew throughout those years, mostly doing watercolor landscape, and planned to go back to school,” he recalls. Returning to Orange County in 1976, he enrolled at Santa Ana College, then transferred to Cal State Fullerton in 1979.

“When I first got to Cal State, I was making paintings, but I evolved away from that because the burden of history that painting carried then was just too much,” Tomaselli says. “Painting is less self-conscious now than it’s been in decades, but that wasn’t the case in the early ‘80s, and I couldn’t figure out how to get out from under art history and make something new. Because I was so turned on by Nauman and Burden, I started making installations instead. When I saw the Nauman retrospective, I had no context to put it in other than the theme parks I’d visited, so I conflated those two influences and made several installations, involving darkened spaces and light, that investigated theme parks as structures for escapism and forgetting.

“From there, I started thinking about painting as a window into another reality, and it was then that I first considered using drug culture as subject matter,” he adds. “I came of age as the hippie dream and modernism were running out of steam--by the late ‘70s those utopian ideologies had fallen apart, and I had to contend with the rubble of the ‘60s. Artists like Mike Kelley had already poked through that rubble and produced great work, but I wanted to see if there was a shred of utopianism that could still stand, because that was what attracted me to the art world to begin with--that idea of newness, and perceiving the world as a place of infinite possibility.”

Tomaselli graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1982, moved to downtown L.A. and embarked on a series of blue-collar jobs that included sheet rocking, woodworking and auto repair. By 1985 he’d had enough of L.A. and relocated to Williamsburg, a Brooklyn neighborhood he describes as “a very humane place to live.” Landing on the East Coast, he supported himself working as a picture framer until 1991, when his work began to sell at a steady clip.

“I’ve never had that big, hot ‘look at this new guy’ discovery thing. My career has built slowly, and though it’s on the modest side, it has momentum and seems solid,” says Tomaselli, who married his longtime girlfriend, Laura Miller, a graphic artist and writer, in 1995.

In fact, Tomaselli is having his “look at this new guy” moment right now. His show at Christopher Grimes has sold out, and he has several works in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum in New York, where he was recently included in the group show “Heart, Body, Mind and Soul,” curated by Thelma Goldin. His work can also be seen in a survey show titled “Pop Abstraction” that opened last week at the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia, and more of it goes on view in May in “Project 63,” a four-person show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

He has obviously been working hard, and after his L.A. opening, he headed out for a vacation in Joshua Tree. From there, he planned to head north for a bit of bird watching in Chico.

“I’m a generalist and don’t really know much about birds,” he cheerfully acknowledges. “I just like a lot of stuff.”

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FRED TOMASELLI, Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica. Dates: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Ends March 7. Phone: (310) 587-3373.