If you love museums as I do, I always suggest joining your
local favorite(s). And, if you can,
getting an upgraded membership such as the one I have with the Oakland Museum.
It’s nice to support a much-loved museum, but it also could get you up
into the North American Reciprocal
(NARM) level. With my membership, a guest and myself have free
access to hundreds of participating museums in the U.S. and Canada. Before I hit the road, I start at NARM’s site and see what museums will be nearby
and what special exhibits are taking place.
With that in mind, I found myself in Newport Beach,
California on Saturday. Away from the
beach, it’s a land of sterile office parks and condominiums where signage is
discreet and tasteful. The museum would
have been impossible to find without GPS.
But it was worth the effort.
When I realized I had an opportunity to see a new show of Fred Tomaselli’s
work at the Orange County Museum of Art, I
knew I’d have to head south as part of my L.A. weekend. Back in the 1990’s San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts hosted one of
the best exhibits they have ever had – it was a big show of Tomaselli’s mixed
media paintings/collages. The work
incorporated thousands of prescription and non-prescription pills as well as
hemp leaves all encased in resin. That
was an amazing show.
The current show, Fred Tomaselli: The
Times, fills three rooms and is dominated by a newer direction in his
work that began in 2005. Starting with a
front page of the New York Times, the artist modifies the photo by adding paint
and occasional collage elements. The
original black and white photos are enhanced with vivid, color details. The results range from the abstract to geometric
patterns, to occasional representational images. All contained within the boundaries of the
original photo. The modified front pages
are then digitized and reprinted, to finalize and preserve the pieces done on
unstable newsprint. The results are
often beautiful, even when addressing serious, front page news. For example, the Hurricane Katrina piece
makes New Orleans appear to be inundated by a colorful flood that looks like a
mass Sol Lewitt installation. The pieces
seem to work in part because they remain on the pages of the New York Times,
rather than removed form their original context. And surrounded by the original stories, the
gravity of the subject matter never seems trivialized even with the colorful
art.
Living in San Francisco and seeing some of the exhibits that
pass through as over-hyped, blockbusters shows I remain baffled why we, here in
the big city, are not getting shows like this one. I feel confident predicting that Fred
Tomaselli’s work is of the caliber where big crowds will line up to see it in
museums — a century from now. In the
meantime, we get to see it in quiet exhibits and wait for what comes from him
next.
I also need to mention a smaller and complimentary show that
is also at the museum right now. Dieter
Roth’s Piccadillies is a series of work beginning in 1969 where the
artist took a single postcard of London’s Piccadilly Circus, blew it up and
made multiple prints. Each print was the
basis for a new abstract painting with layers of paint that at times follow and
mostly obscure the original image.
Seeing an individual piece would be interesting. The opportunity to have a gallery filled with
them and observing the work as a series is the best way to see Roth’s
work.
If you’re in Southern California, you’d better hurry, as
both shows close on May 24, 2015.
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