Therman Statom at Dorothy Weiss - San Francisco, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, June, 1995 by Ben Marks

A decade and a half ago, Therman Statom made dangerous installations of shattered panels of expressionistically painted plate glass, one razor-sharp fragment leaning precariously against the next. They seemed an angry challenge to the then--and, incredibly, still--largely torpid glass-art world. Viewers marveled at Statom's controlled havoc, but for gallery owners the shows were insurance nightmares, offering little hope of profit since it was frequently impossible to dismantle the spontaneously designed houses of cards without destroying them.

His recent exhibition was as in-your-face as the best of those environments. The sense of danger was absent (the risk of impalement was relatively low), but as in earlier installations, every surface in the gallery-from the walls to the floor to the ceiling--was exuberantly painted, as if by Cy Twombly, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt and Clyfford Still on a drunk. Blownglass bowls, plates, vases and leaning stacks of globes were scattered about, adding dimension and texture to the confusion. These "props," as Statom calls them--some clear, others in hues of cobalt blue or chrome yellow--were often paired with the constructed objects for which Statom is known, in this case several plate-glass ladders, a glass table and a glass chair.

The centerpiece of the show was Northern Tide, a ceilingless room roughly 8 feet wide and high, and almost 1 0 feet long. It was constructed of boxes or panels of plate glass, some square, some rectangular. A few were painted with vaguely pastoral images (a landscape, red tulips, etc. . Many others were sandblasted on the back, providing an opaque ground to better display the contents of the transparent containers, which included everything from bottles of colored liquid lined up in a row to fresh eucalyptus leaves (the moisture from the slowly decaying material condensing on the glass). One panel bore a capable academic rendering of Nefertiti, another a drawing of a yellow rowboat.

Once Statom leaned pieces of glass against each other and hoped his construction wouldn't fall down. These days the artist is taking his risks visually instead of physically, with images pulled from art history or from a quirky personal lexicon developed over the years (birds and flowers, Mexican playing cards, vases and other metaphors for the human). His reliance on the associative powers of his imagery, as well as his expectation that all his disparate elements will hold together, is perhaps the most precarious undertaking of all. This time, he pulled it off.