The cover image for this issue of Artkrush is a detail of Glassy, a 2006 mixed-media work by Fred Tomaselli. With glossy surfaces and rich details, Tomaselli's works could easily be mistaken for finely rendered oil paintings, but the artist actually suspends minute cutouts and unexpected objects in layers of resin and paint.

Born in Santa Monica in 1956, Tomaselli grew up in Southern California, receiving his BA in painting and drawing from California State University, Fullerton, in 1982. He has enjoyed solo exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery in New York, White Cube in London, Carlier Gebauer in Berlin, and Galerie Anne de Villepoix in Paris, and his work has entered the collections of New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Glassy suggests a psychedelic haze, a subject not atypical for the artist, who includes actual aspirin pills, magic mushrooms, and cannabis leaves in his dense collages. In MoCA LA's 2005 show Ecstasy: In and About Altered States, Tomaselli exhibited Hang Over, an image of a tree strung with acrylic pills, photocollaged flowers, and body parts canopying over a blooming forest floor. Recent work extends beyond the hallucinatory and builds on a preoccupation with flora, birds, and human anatomy. In his exhibition at James Cohan Gallery in 2006, each of the 12 pieces incorporated elements from Tomaselli's own backyard, such as the real fig leaves that cradle two jewel-toned birds in Migrant Fruit Thugs, bringing notes of the real to what is otherwise a luscious fantasy. - Lauren McKee