Fred Tomaselli: Monsters of Paradise
Until October 3; Fruitmarket Gallery

DRIFT
Until September 19; Stills Gallery Screenlab

Fred Tomaselli is the product of an age. Born in 1950s California, he grew up so close to Disneyland that he could see Tinkerbell flying through the night sky. The first waterfall he ever saw was pumped over pretend rocks by a hidden machine. In the late 1970s, hallucinogenic substances were a regular shortcut to transcendence, and cheesy eastern black light posters were a common accessory to the chemically-enhanced lifestyle. He’s older and wiser now, but Tomaselli has harnessed these psychedelic influences and set them in resin for our vicarious pleasure.

His technique is a unique kind of layered collage, combining cut-out scraps from magazines with real psychoactive leaves, pills, and the occasional dead moth. All of this is captured in layers of resin, along with painted patterns which draw together and disguise the real objects.

From cubism to dadaism and beyond, collage has been used as a way of fragmenting reality, of breaking up our preconceived understanding of the world and of art. Tomaselli’s work feels different. People are made up of hundreds of tiny eyes, noses, hands, flowers, and butterflies. They are added to, not broken down. They are unified and whole – a garden of earthly delights all gathered together in one body.

In fact, the Garden of Earthly Delights is a good comparison, because Hieronymus Bosch’s enigmatic triptych is a seething mixture of fantasy and nightmare. While Tomaselli’s garish, patterned works are visually attractive, there is a definite sense of menace below the smooth, resin surface.

Monsters of Paradise, Times Two features two lizard-like creatures made of marijuana leaves. Their heads are starbursts of human facial features. Their creepy crawly legs are human arms and their tangled tails emerge from a corkscrewing daisy-chain of cut-out birds. The visual whooshing and whirling invokes a sense of night panic, the dense explosion of eyes staring out at you from the pitch black ground.

Tomaselli enjoys “changing the use value” of the colourful drugs that are locked away in resin. He wants them to induce the same effects, but through our eyeballs instead of our bloodstreams. Being a high-minded art critic, I have of course never sampled such mind-bending substances, but I do imagine that this vertiginous sense I get, of being gripped by a swirling, patterned nightmare, is pretty close to tripping.

They say you can never match the feeling you get from your first hit. That is also, unfortunately, true of Tomaselli’s works. He uses his restricted vocabulary of flowers, leaves, insects and pills with great skill, but by the time you’ve got to the end of the show, you feel you’ve seen as many combinations of the above-named items as you would ever wish to.

There’s a combination of another sort downstairs at Stills Gallery. The small black box space is part of Edinburgh International Film Festival’s Black Box strand, and a programme of video art, DRIFT, has been put together for the occasion by New Media Scotland.

If you can manage 85 minutes in one go, you will see 18 short films whose emphasis is on experimental sound, and its link with the moving image. The selection has been threaded together with intelligence, moving subtly from nature through to illusion and memory, and from there to man-made environments. Gradually the works become more abstract, then absurd, ending up with a couple of films which expose artificial realities as contrived clichés.

This is not a collection of music videos, although one of the most successful, You’re Not Blank, is a simple mix of music and image – or more accurately, lack of image. The jazzy soundtrack, which sounds like it was assembled from ad-hoc percussive sounds, is accompanied by video interference. Every sort of poor reception is edited together, from wavy lines to snowy pictures. Rob Kennedy resisted the usual temptation to match sound with image too literally, and the result is a fresh kind of visual jazz.

Not all of the soundtracks are musical. Susanne Ramsenthaler’s Mirage employs wartime sounds to completely alter our perception of what we see. In a deceptively simple play on illusion, memory and history, a fish in a rippling pond doubles up as a hazy flashback to wartime zeppelins. Without the soundtrack, it would just be a fish in a pond.

One of those films which bridge the gap between nature and man-made environments is Windmills of Innerleithen, by Richard Ashrowan, Alexander Hamilton and Shannon Tofts. It’s a lyrical homage to the beauty of wind farms, the seductive soundtrack taking the wind as its starting point. The windmills themselves play the roles of dancers, the camera worshipping their every swishing move.

Video art does tend to have a bad habit of repeating itself ad nauseum, and there are one or two films in this mix which are guilty of this offence. On the whole though, the programme is entertaining and visually rich as well as music to the ears.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 15.08.04