The Press Democrat May 1996
“Artist’s work tells stories of humanity”
“Family Time,” Tom Curtis’s large artwork installed in Copperfield’s Café on Kentucky Street, is a mahogany plywood panel of quadrants colored white, green, brown and an orange-yellow, the colors of the seasons he remembers as a child in Oklahoma City.
At the top is a cream colored plaster cast of his pregnant wife’s abdomen, taken the day before their daughter was born. In the center, rotating at three times the speed of a second hand, is the plaster cast of their daughter’s body.
The daughter, Cyan, has, in effect, become part of the art, and the piece fulfills the function art had before it was displayed in museums and galleries.
“Native-American and African art told a story about an event or a belief.” Says Curtis. “The art contained that event or belief. That’s why it existed, to pass on a story, not as decoration.
Another piece, “Wild Blood,” tells another story. On a large red background with deep red splotches are flat, featureless monkeys, their arms curved and linked. They are simple, fun, toy-like, painted in bright colors as if decoration for a child’s room, but there’s an edge: a realistic, weathered, three-dimensional human skull in the upper left corner. Monkeys are thought to be the source of AIDS and Ebola viruses, and, in “Wild Blood,” their playfulness is an acute contrast to the macabre.
“Humans have the idea they can control nature, but when it comes down to it, that notion is just human folly,” says Curtis, 43, who works in a 10,000 square-foot studio near the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. “What humans co and what they think they can do is very absurd, and it’s important for artists to represent that.”
As much of human life is the attempt to create order form chaos, so, too, is the search for an AIDS cure.
“Medicine is order from the chaos of disease,” says Curtis, whose work is influenced by scientific research. “Art is the place scientists can bare their souls and where artists can be scientists. Look at Salk. He tested his polio vaccine on himself, He took a risk, and that came from the artistic side.”
Curtis’s exhibition illustrates his range of media: found objects assembled in extravagant displays, three-dimensional props, paintings, and kinetic pieces with sculptural elements.
Curtis, who makes his living making props for special events, was raised outside Oklahoma city, and as a teen-ager living in his parent’s garage learned the beginnings of the technical side of his art watching John Gnagy’s 1960s TV art show and pouring through his aunt’s “Famous Artists” correspondence school books.
At 24, he worked for two years in a stained glass and prop studios in Dallas, then moved to San Francisco to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, where he earned a master’s degree in painting and sculpture.
-Andrew Jowers
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