Artist and curator of the “Thrift Store Paintings” exhibition and accompanying book (and owner of the Teeth Lady painting which appeared on the cover of the Amok Fourth Dispatch), Shaw ambitiously illustrates his personal dream diary in the form of 145 brilliant black-and-white pencil sketches accompanied by his twistedly free-associative text captions. Sample captions:
“I WAS AT AMOK SHOWING MIKE GLASS A BOOK I'D MADE OF THE DREAM DRAWINGS, BUT THEY WEREN'T FULL DRAWINGS, JUST DETAILS OF THE MOST LURID AND EMBARRASSING DREAMS AND THE TEXT DESCRIBING IN RAMBLING RUN-ONS BETWEEN DREAMS.”
“JAMES BOND WAS ONE OF MY SHRINK'S PATIENTS AND I WAS ENCOURAGED TO TALK ABOUT BOND. WHEN I WAS DONE, I REMOVED ONE OF MY EARS, WHICH WAS A SPY TAPE RECORDER AND I WAS WORKING FOR THE OTHER SIDE.”
“I'M AT A LAKE THAT HAS BRINE WELLS AND TREES GROWING ACROSS IT. ROB'T. WILLIAMS LEADS ME TO A SANDBAR. I NOTICE A MAN WALKING UNDERWATER. WE SIT ON SOME BLEACHERS FROM WHICH A MUSCULAR NUDE MAN DIVES INTO THE WATER AND TO MY SIDE I SEE A BLACK JANITOR CLEANING UP SOME PARTIALLY SUBMERGED OFFICES WHICH SEEM TO BE QUITE EXTENSIVE.”

Publisher: Smart Art
Paperback: 288 pages
Illustrated

Suspended in immaculate resin fields, Tomaselli’s chosen materials—a pharmacopoeia including everything from Percodan to Sudafed, hemp leaves to blotter acid—become planets, cells, stitches, landscapes, hypnotic patterns. Time and space warp, and patterns of saturated colors swirl, shimmer, vibrate and fly by like squadrons of alien crafts which flash in one’s peripheral vision. The implications of the drugs and their contexts dovetail and jam, multiply and complicate each image’s multilayered meanings and affects. The sublime beauty of these compositions dispenses a blast of psychic pleasure, strangely flavored by a mournful sense of the spirituality we long for in everyday life.
Like drugs, these works demand nothing of the viewer, and generously deliver the unexpected. This is not to say they exist outside of art history, and Alisa Tager’s excellent essay explores influences and inferences involving movements from Constructivism to Conceptualism. Both Tager and David A. Greene met the challenge of soberly discussing this gloriously experiential work (with the possible exception of Greene’s Grateful Dead concert acid trip reverie), and the color reproductions in this small gem of a catalog are very good. MH

Publisher: Smart Art
Paperback: 37 pages
Illustrated