American Folk Art: Big Raven By Tomaselli

Big Raven, a centrifugal painting of his 2010-2011 mid-period retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, is one of these, drawing from typically American folk art motifs while inverting issues of perception,the drugs are figurative without ingestion. Also check out Tomaselli’s “Big Raven” (2008), a massive bird perched atop a stone that seems to explode into particulate snowflakes. The black background of the piece separates from its subject like a dissection board. Yet as phantasmagorical as the work looks, it has clear visual precedents. In context, the underlying weirdness of Audubon’s work comes out just as the probing, scientific quality is uncovered in Tomaselli’s