Art Hag

Head over to the Brooklyn Museum to check out the mid-career survey of 25-year Williamsburg resident Fred Tomaselli. The exhibit, Tomaselli's first major solo show in New York, showcases about 50 of his signature mixed-media paintings from 1990 to the present. The artist's detailed, elaborate works are created using a combination of cutout images of birds, plants, mouths, and eyes culled from field guides and magazines, pills (Oxycotin, aspirin, Benadryl...) leaves, hemp, and paint. The results are dynamic, colorful, kaleidoscopic images that require long studies both up-close and from afar. The museum has divided the artist's works into four galleries—the first displays his abstracts; the second shows his figurative works; the third, his avian images; and the fourth exhibits 15 pieces from a recent series of prints and collages in which Tomaselli takes a copy of the New York Times front page and alters the images with his own distinctive touch. The fourth gallery also shows a few samples of CD covers that feature music-lover Tomaselli's artwork for bands including Magnetic Fields and Phish.

The son of Swiss immigrants, the 54-year-old Tomaselli was raised in southern California, where the "manufactured reality" of the theme parks he grew up near influenced the artist along with "the music and drug counterculture of Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s," (from Brooklyn Museum's website). Unsurprisingly, Tomaselli's "hobbies of gardening, kayaking, and bird-watching" also serve as influences in his work. Referencing art history and pop culture, Tomaselli meticulously creates works that are surreal and spectacular. Learn more at Brooklynmuseum.org and check out an interview with the artist at observer.com where he discusses the exhibit, his work, and moving his studio to Bushwick. Through January 2, 2011.

Summer Swell, 2007, photocollage, acrylic, gouache, and resin on wood