(upbeat music) (waves crashing) (soft music) - My name is Sophia Kayafas, I'm a figurative painter and I moved to New York six years ago to pursue my career as an artist.

Now, I've been painting in my studio under lockdown for the past three months and I'm starting to lose my mind.

I feel completely isolated and creatively depleted.

(soft music) And I keep wondering, what other artists are still out here?

What are they making?

And if they're feeling the same way I do?

(dramatic music) How are we going to survive 2020?

(upbeat music) So I decided to hop on my bike and take a trip to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Once known for its artists and hipsters, DIY spaces and huge loft parties.

But riding around here now, all you see is condos and yuppies.

I'm going to visit Fred Tomaselli, he's an incredible painter and collage artist.

He grew up during the '70s and '80s and he makes work about how we perceive reality.

He's been at the Brooklyn Museum, he's even part of the Collection of the MoMA.

In fact, he's shown work all over the world.

Fred's been based in Brooklyn since 1985, so he knows more than a little something about what it means to make it in New York.

(soft music) This is your garden?

- Yeah, yeah, I've lived here since 1997 and I've been in the neighborhood since 85.

(soft music) - This is such a paradise that you've built, you know?

- Is not so bad, right?

- I know.

- And what's really great, is I really need it right now.

(soft music) You know, there's an idea of ordered chaos, that a garden is nature but it's also kind of a culturally mediated form of nature.

(soft music) It's constantly being mediated through this sort of cultural lens and I sort of feel like there's this, like the canvas can be a kind of a similar or sort of wild and ordered area.

(soft music) Plus I'm really into altered states and psychoactivity and so many plants like this one here, this is the San Pedro cactus, this is a Bolivian cactus.

It's illegal but it contains Mescalin basically, so I like the fact that there are these magic plants here that can't alter reality but just by looking at them, they almost alter reality.

That guy over there, it's a datura and this is a pan global hallucinogen popular in the Wiccan community and some metal communities.

- [Sophia] It's so cool.

(soft music) - [Fred] There's a Monarch migrating through.

(soft music) - [Sophia] Do you feel like you're commenting on reality?

- I'm commenting and questioning.

I'm responding to evanescent impulses and into intuition and mysterious sort of mechanisms that I don't even understand sometimes.

So it's not always, it's not like... Like, I may start with a conceptual idea about art making in general but the actual practice of it is way more intuitive.

I think the older I get the less sure I am about everything.

(laughs) I think I was way more sure of myself when I was like snot-nosed punk rock kid who thought I had it all figured out.

- I feel like I've learned a lot about what it means to be an artist in New York.

And that's so different than what I thought it was 'cause I thought it looked a certain way.

- I didn't really understand what New York was when I moved here because I came here sight unseen.

One of the things I noticed was there were people that were making art for the market.

That was really strange to me because in Los Angeles where I'm from in the 80s, there was no market.

So when I came here, I didn't know why I was coming here other than I thought New York might be an interesting place to go, since I had broken up with my girlfriend, I'd lost my loft and I got fired from my job.

- It's all coming together.

(chuckles) - And when it all came together, I was like, "Well, if I'm going to move, I'm going to move big."

And I just came here sight unseen, right?

- Yeah.

- And so when I moved to Greenpoint that was like, people were like, "Why did you, wait a minute, you came 3000 miles to New York and you missed Manhattan by two miles?

You're such a dumb ass.

Like, nobody's going to come out to Greenpoint and see your work."

- What year did you get this studio?

- Got it in November of 1985.

- Oh, wow.

Is the area very different?

What was it like back then?

- Oh, it was primarily Latino.

Greenpoint is often referred to as a Polish neighborhood but they really weren't in this area at that time.

- What did it used to look like?

Has a lot of things changed?

- It looks like this.

(laughs) It's still like, kind of set in amber.

(pigeons cooing) You would hear gunshots and it was no big deal.

- How many times have you been mugged?

- Three times.

- Three?

- Yeah- - [Sophia] Did you think you going to die?

- I never thought it was going to die, but New York was rough back in the 80s.

- I heard there was wild dogs running through this area.

- I got bit by a dog and the owner actually told me that I could shoot his dog and pulled out a gun and he was really mad at his dog.

He's like, 'cause I'm the third person the dog had bit that month.

The dog's name was Zorro, I still remember it.

So I was like, "I don't want to shoot your dog, man.

I just need to go to the hospital."

- Oh my God.

- And then ambulance up and they said it would be 100 bucks.

And he said, "Well, I'll pay."

So I got a car service for five bucks, went to Woodhull (laughs) and kept the 95 bucks, which I used to pay off my medical bills.

- Wow!

- And that was Halloween actually, in 1985.

- [Sophia] Wow.

- So then I went outside and everybody's egging each other and there's fireworks and there's mayhem in the streets.

I mean, New York was wild.

I had to dodge eggs and my leg was all messed up.

And I ended up at a party in the East Village at some friends of mine.

I told them my story, they were like, "welcome to New York, man."

- Oh, that's so punk rock though.

- Yeah you're in New York now, you're getting bit by dogs.

You're dodging eggs, you're there.

And then two weeks later I signed the lease on this place.

(sirens wailing) - [Sophia] But you've seen gentrification, basically.

- I mean, all of us artists we're the viruses of gentrification.

As much as we complain about it, when we move into these areas we are looking for cheap space and we like, I liked it, I liked this area the way it was, but we set into motion or our friends would come and visit us and go, "Oh wow, that's what a great deal."

And they move in and next thing you know, the place is getting gentrified and you're part of it, whether you like it or not.

(soft music) - You've been here long enough to see New York especially probably Brooklyn re-invent itself many times.

- Yeah.

(chuckles) - [Sophia] Is that happening again right now?

- I think maybe, but I don't know for sure.

I think we're in the middle of something that we don't really quite understand.

(soft music) I mean, right now, it's tough to be in New York because this is not a city that lends itself to social distancing.

Of all the cities in America, New York is the city that it's about social closeness.

It's what makes the city great, right?

- [Sophia] Yeah.

- This is why New York is a great place.

It's the very antithesis of what the virus is demanding, is what the city is about.

But maybe with COVID, maybe there'll be, maybe rents are going to come down a little bit.

Maybe it'll be a little bit more affordable, you know?

'Cause the city needs to refresh itself.

It needs to have...

It needs to be alluring to the young, it needs to constantly reinvent itself.

But I mean, it can't just be a bunch of like baby boomers, just sitting around like holding on, you know?

It needs to have other new younger voices that make things interesting.

(soft music) - I feel like with the pandemic, it was almost like a dream come true.

All of a sudden I had zero responsibilities, I had nowhere I needed to be, I had nothing but time.

- [Fred] Oh yeah?

- Yeah.

- [Fred] Yeah I guess so.

- Because I had no job, so it was just quiet.

- I was working on big large scale resin works in my studio, which I'm still working on for a show that was supposed to open up in May.

And it was at James Cohen Gallery and I was working like night and day, weekends, like just trying to get this work done.

Obviously my show was postponed and so I took a bunch of supplies and I moved them to upstairs to a little bedroom, little spare room that we have.

And I began re-investigating the New York Times, it something I'd abandoned for a couple of years.

I started making these drawings that were about these giant horrific headlines coming about like, working out my anxieties, I guess, through these drawings.

The virus isn't just biological, it's social.

We have a really toxic government that's taking a bad situation and making it much worse.

We have like all these issues that are coming to the fore right now, over racial inequality, over social inequality, over our lack of a health system that functions, you know, and the pandemic is just laying bare all this crap that we've been sort of like living kind of with in a sort of like kind of coexisting with all this crap and somehow or another, it's all coming to a head right now.

So I feel really unsettled, but part of me is hopeful.

Part of me feels like that maybe this is... That maybe the pandemic will force people to understand what's needed and what the next stages of society should be.

You know what I mean?

- [Sophia] Yeah.

- It's just like, I don't want it to go back to the way it was before, maybe the pandemic, maybe it's a chance for us to like address some of these issues that have haunted this culture of ours for so long.

(soft music) - I keep hoping that if I like mature as an artist, that I will find some kind of balance in my life that I will actually be able to walk into my studio and not feel overwhelmed and not feel like the weight of the world is crushing me.

Did you ever feel that, do you feel that at all now?

- Yeah, I do.

(soft music) But I don't know if that's necessarily a bad thing.

- Yeah?

- I mean, I'm mostly really puzzled by it and annoyed by it and I feel like I'm not quite getting it right and it's kind of elusive.

So I kind of just...

It's a itch that I keep scratching, so it's a weird thing that rarely gets satisfied.

I satisfy it from time to time but mostly, I mean it's perpetual state of dissatisfaction of trying to achieve my... Something that has to do with how it is to be me in the world and how it is to be and what this world is all about.

And I feel like it's constantly, it's eluding me, but I keep going at it.

(soft music) - It's been a year of constant devastating headlines.

Fred seems to have made order out of the chaos or his own logical chaos out of the order by taking those headlines and reinterpreting them.

He gets to retell our daily narrative and create a conversation about our own perceptions.

But I also realized talking to Fred how a community of artists is so important, especially now at a time of social isolation.

I feel like I might've missed out on that community of artists back in the day, but maybe in a post-pandemic world space will get cheaper again and we can have our studios and a stronger, more vibrant artists community.

(soft music) (pigeons cooing) (sirens wailing)