There is no question that Jim Thomson’s curiously beautiful fish bowls command authority. But let’s face it folks, it is a curious beauty and it is a unique authority. Post-Rococo and Manneristic gestures are themselves framed by haute conceptualist experiments that defy the limits normally associated with the concept of an enclosed vessel. One result is that the beauty of the fish bowls has the power to invoke first, a sense of awe and wonder, and next, a clear reflective frame of mind that inspires the kind of philosophical speculation that originally compelled Thomson to dream up the project in the first place – the kind of speculation, in fact, that magicians and physicists sometimes succeed in inspiring us to do...Janis Runge