Lately, I’ve been checking in with colleagues and discussing what is new in their process and thinking regarding their work. Most recently, I’ve been up in Aspen and have found a number of people with whom I worked on projects in my early years in New York. I stopped by The Aspen Art Museum, July 1st to visit with Fred Tomaselli. Fred and I go way back to when we worked on such projects together. As Fred put it, “I don’t like wasting time”, so the framing projects on which we worked technically fed a large body of his work. These days, Fred said, he has been “thinking more with his hands”, making images that proceed without preconception as to the finished pieces. It was good to see and catch up briefly with Fred who was at the Aspen Art Museum to talk about his work with Director and Chief Curator, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, and do a book signing. Fred was ultimately pleased with her curatorial approach last summer at AAM, which involved grouping Fred’s paintings thematically for his solo show there.
Last week’s event was open to the public. The well attended discussion was part of the book signing, a project which surveys Fred’s iconic work over the last twenty years.
Over the years, while Fred has been in Brooklyn making work, I left New York to travel the Southwest and visit Japan– pursuing very directly– states of consciousness and ideas that could be translated into visual imagery. While both Fred Tomaselli’s work and my own intersect in a common conceptual interest of creating imagery keyed to extreme psychic states, and in creating vehicles for ecstatic transformation, the similarities diverge there. My involvement in projects with the last prints of the members of the New York School, as well as my sense of movement and traversing dramatic space through dance, is the history out of which my work is born, has evolved and is moving.
To see my work in 2010 – This fall I will be at UCF, Center For Emerging Media.
For more information, please sign up on our mailing list (presently under construction-so send an email to margaret@petteeolsen.com with Pettee Olsen email list in the subject heading) and we will be happy to keep you informed about forth coming shows and events.
To check out what’s happening in Aspen this summer at the Aspen Art Museum, Anderson Ranch, as well other non-profits and other venues around town, click here:
http://art-collecting.com/galleries_co_aspen.htm
To see more of Fred Tomaselli’s work go to :