A few months ago Dan Cameron came and spoke to the creative department at Peter Mayer about an upcoming city wide art show — a biennial — the first of which is called Prospect 1. The show is meant to happen every two years (hence the title) for 10 years: Prospect 1, Prospect 2, … Prospect 5. He talked a bit about his background, the background of biennials in the art world, and a bit about the artists being showcased.

One of those artists is Fred Tomaselli. From Wikipedia:

Fred Tomaselli (born in Santa Monica, California in 1956) is an American artist. He is best known for his highly detailed paintings on wood panels, combining an array of unorthodox materials suspended in a thick layer of clear, epoxy resin.

This past weekend was the last weekend for Prospect 1 so I took the family and a friend out to see a few sites. Fred’s work was hung in the old U.S. Mint on the corner of Decatur and Esplanade in literally the last room of the last museum we visited, but for me it was the pinnacle of everything we’d seen. When Dan first spoke to us and showed us slides, I was impressed by Fred Tomaselli’s work. But seeing a few slides (or a few pictures on the web) does not compare to seeing these pieces up close.

He works with mixed media: paint; pictures of eyes, hands, lips, etc from magazines; pills; leaves… then coats his pieces in a thick layer of clear epoxy. My friend and I were discussing how most of the art that we like has a lot to do with the creative process, not just the end results. Honestly, many artists’ end results just aren’t that impressive. Something my wife and I discussed was that as a whole Tomaselli’s compositions aren’t necessarily that great. That sounds a bit harsh, but what I mean is that the real beauty in his work is in the details. He creates these great swirling patterns, made of dots of paint and tiny pictures of eyes and butterflies and leaves from his garden and benadryl tablets and all of this stuff. The pieces are huge and you stand in front of them and look at this massive black space full of fireworks. There’s so much depth and texture, yet it’s all trapped in this thick epoxy. I don’t know what the symbolism is in these magazine cut-outs of life, arranged in this dazzling display, yet trapped like they’re stuck in amber.

But I don’t think it’s about symbolism. I don’t think that symbolism is really as premeditated as people expect that it is, anyway. Fred Tomaselli says that his works are “eye candy” and I’d believe they’re not necessarily meant to be anything more than that. But that’s also why they work, it’s what makes them good.

Of course, everyone in the city sees this and thinks “Mardi Gras beads?”