Tom Bills at b. sakata garo
By David Roth, a contributing editor to Artweek

Tom Bills, Ester, 2004, flame-cut slab, 17"x16"x7 1/2, at b. sakata garo, Sacramento

I'll confess: Going into this show I knew a lot more about Tom Bills than I did about his work, and that information carried some weighty expectations. Namely, that Bill's eight-year stint as Richard Serra's studio assistant would make for super-sized sculptures with ambitions to match. Bills's steel sculptures are monumental, but only in impact--not size or scale.
A Detroit native who spent twenty-five years in New York before joining the UC Davis art faculty, Bills has plenty of noteworthy large-scale sculptures to his credit, both here and abroad. However, his output over the past twenty years consisted primarily of compact structures: 500 - to 1,000-pound, flame-cut slabs that reference figurative and natural elements, often in a single piece. Stationed on the floor or on pedestals, the fourteen works seen here stand waist-or knee-high and require viewers to sit to fully appreciate them. What they reveal are a masterful manipulation of weight, scale, texture, volume and space that add up to a unique vision.
Bills's strong suits are his ability to seamlessly integrate opposites and conduct extended improvisions around a theme. Here, the reoccurring motif is a twelve-sided, see-through polygon wedded to an irregularly shaped mass rendered in either rust or a highly polished finish.
A prime example of the latter is Monkey See, a title that probably refers to the ovoid through which viewers can spy whatever resides in the background. (In this case it's the gallery's outdoor garden.) Buffed to a high gloss, the piece pulls viewers several ways at once. Reflections from the polished surface pulsate like electrical currents from an indeterminate depth and speak of high technology, while the piece's ragged edges whisper funk a la Fred Flintstone. Reconciling those extremes keeps the eye and the brain busy.
Other successful variations on this theme include Lucky Day and Carry that Weight (for VZ), where a reclining figure cartoonishly balances an outsized load. Such dialogues between mass and volume yield shapes that recall Jean Arp, Isamu Noguchi and Alexander Archipenko, and work well because they integrate simple, organic, curvilinear forms into stolid shapes that might otherwise feel inert and flat. That integration prevails throughout the show.
Backbone and Whale Sighting , for example, sit side-by-side and work in tandem, simultaneously suggesting the outlines of a whale enveloping a sexually aroused figure in a yoga pose. Rusted to a ferrous earthy red, they carry less fanfare than the polished pieces, but they still challenge viewers to separate abstract forms from representational images.
Elsewhere, Bills seems to be influenced by southwestern landscapes. Cowboy Dreams , for example, suggest the texture and tone of Utah's redrock monoliths, replete with "windows" in the rock and Rothko-like washes. The same holds for the shiny Smoke Sisters, which even in its polished condition, recalls Monument Valley and Eastern Oregon, a volcanic region that just so happens to have a chain of peaks known as Three Sisters.
Suspending the gravitas normally associated with steel is no easy feat. Bills pulls it off effortlessly with The Eye of a Wing. It's a straightforward representation of an airplane wing punctuated by a hole in the center which imparts the palpable sense that the object could just as easily float into the sky as stand still. The experience is akin to witnessing the landing of the normally peripatetic hummingbird.
The only disappointment in the show is The Three of Us , a rusted piece that resembles a large tuning fork. For the most part, Bills uses straight lines sparingly and to good effect, as in Backbone, Whale Sighting and Cowboy Dreams. But, in The Three of Us they foreclose the possibility of vibration at a point where it ought to be given full throttle. A small quibble in an otherwise strong show.
Tom Bills: New Work closed in October at b. sakata garo, Sacramento.