Fred Tomaselli is feeling a little “blitzed” today, as he puts it, a series of midnight epiphanies about his backyard garden having triggered a stream-of-consciousness mental ballet that kept him from getting any shut-eye. So now he’s battling the effects of insomnia the way countless people the world over do: with a cocktail of caffeine and nicotine. Sitting in Kasia’s, a Polish diner near his Williamsburg, Brooklyn, studio, Tomaselli is slouched in his chair under lace-curtained windows, drinking coffee and chewing nicotine gum. Lots of it. “I’m trying to get my head right, trying to correct my brain chemistry with more chemistry,” he says.
The impact of chemical substances—be they medically necessary or purely recreational—on gray matter has been a recurring theme of Tomaselli’s art for the past 20 years. He has meticulously assembled collages using pharmaceuticals of every size, shape and color encased under layers of resin; he has made what he terms “chemical celestial portraits in inner space and outer space,” using friends’ and loved ones’ preferred drugs, from hallucinogens to decongestants, to depict the stars in the night sky on the days they were born. He has even tackled cigarettes, which the laid-back Tomaselli, still teenager thin at 53 and habitually in sneakers, asserts were harder for him to kick than any of the illicit drugs in his past. For a piece called Dermal Delivery or How I Quit Smoking, he ripped off his daily nicotine patches and glued them into what he describes as a “flesh grid quilt.” “It was sort of a performative work insofar as I was going crazy, I was trying to quit smoking, and I was making my work out of that process,” he says of the three-month ordeal. “Then I ended up starting to smoke at the opening.”
Of course, last night he could have popped an Ambien, or even just a half, which he calls “a velvet hammer—it totally puts me out,” but, he explains, he’d taken the sleeping pill two nights in a row while visiting friends upstate and didn’t want to make it three. Articulate despite his claims to the contrary—“I’m actually pretty smart when you get to know me,” he pleads—he then launches into an exegesis of sleep studies, some of which have found that certain subjects, though seemingly asleep, had the brain activity of wide-awake people. Even weirder, in the morning they reported that they’d had a great night’s rest and felt terrific. “But their brains weren’t shutting down,” Tomaselli says. “They weren’t going into REM sleep.”
Other studies have indicated that Ambien “doesn’t make you sleep so much as it makes you forget that you were awake, that it’s an amnesiac.
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