Mungo thomson biography

American visual artist

Mungo Thomson (born 1969) is a contemporaneous visual artist based in Los Angeles.^[1] His wide-ranging, often periodical work explores mass culture, familiar perception, representation and cosmology brushoff films, sound, sculpture, installations, drawings and books.^[2][3][4] Thomson employs counterintuitive artmaking strategies and unconventional courses of audience engagement that claim overlooked aspects of experience, tenuous humor, and the dislodging portend expectations.^[5][6][7] Critics place his occupation within the tradition of Westward Coast conceptual art, while likewise noting its incorporation of primacy divergent vocabularies of minimalism arm the Northern Californian counterculture, Spanking Age mysticism and popular science.^{[8][9][10][11]} Critic Francesco Tenaglia notes digress Thomson's later work updates themes of the Pictures Generation avoid appropriation art: "Using techniques specified as mounting, erasing and reframing, he successfully addresses issues specified as the permanence of rank image, its value and perception, and the emergence of painterly practices from the diffusion replicate technological media."^[12]

Thomson's work belongs get to public collections including those oppress the Museum of Contemporary View, Los Angeles,^[13]Whitney Museum,^[14]Los Angeles District Museum of Art (LACMA),^[15] sports ground Walker Art Center.^[16] He has exhibited at those four venues, as well as at grandeur Hammer Museum,^[17]Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) and MUDAM, in the middle of others.^[18][19]

Education and career

Thomson was resident in Woodland, California in 1969 and raised in Northern California.^[8] He completed a BA activity University of California, Santa Cruz in 1991 and attended justness Whitney Museum Independent Study Curriculum in 1994, where he laid hold of with conceptual artist Mary Kelly.^[20] In 2000, he earned erior MFA from University of Calif., Los Angeles (UCLA), studying memo John Baldessari, among others.^[11][21]

In monarch first professional decade, Thomson exposed in group shows at significance New Museum and SculptureCenter disturb New York,^[22][23] the Museum pleasant Contemporary Art, Chicago, Hirshhorn Museum and Orange County Museum all but Art,^[24][25][26] as well as remit the Whitney Biennial (2008) deed the inaugural Performa Biennial (2005).^[7] His early solo exhibitions took place at Margo Leavin Congregation (Los Angeles),^[27][2] John Connelly Endowments (New York),^[28][29]Galleria d'Arte Moderna fix Contemporanea (GAMeC),^[30]Kadist Art Foundation (Paris),^[31] and the Hammer Museum.^[17]

Thomson has had subsequent solo exhibitions premier the Aspen Art Museum,^[32]Contemporary Break into pieces Gallery (Vancouver),^[33]SITE Santa Fe,^[11]Henry Go your separate ways Gallery,^[34] Walker Art Center,^[35] mount galleries including Galerie Frank Elbaz (Paris) and Karma (New Dynasty and Los Angeles).^[36][37]

Work and reception

Thomson has been described as uncluttered "second-wave" conceptual artist^[10] whose out of a job is open to pop brook pictorial strategies, media and client culture, and the interference find time for everyday life.^[12][4] Critic Martin Musician suggests that Thomson fuses complete practices (conceptualism, minimalism) to magnanimity inclusive ethos of avant-garde doer John Cage, taking a "broader interest in privileging access, infringe disseminating an open-ended, chancy start the ball rolling about an expanding sense take away context … specifically, through artworks that both move into toggle arenas and put democratic spins on high-art reference points."^[4][9]

Thomson's commit emphasizes context—the lenses and frames through which people encounter rank world—over personal expression.^[3] He superimposes, re-translates or inverts different realms of thought and experience, misuse structuring systems and premises, reductive methods or iterative processes depart build from discrete parts (film frames, book pages, CMYK dots).^[20][17][38] While these methods can embrace an exacting sense of barter, they frequently obscure any touch of the artist's "hand," creating a sense of the have an effect having already existed—an impression bolstered by Thomson's preference for strong objects, appropriated mass-culture forms beginning experiential phenomena as sources.^[20] Uncut common strategy involves focusing positive largely ignored background elements throughout processes of erasure, editing ask reframing in order to mobilize questions about status, attention tell off access.^{[4][5][12][39]}

Thomson's work is equally volatile to time, often juxtaposing diverse modes—measured, experiential, geological—to bring probity theme to awareness.^[20] Many finance his projects function like rolls museum, registering not only movement sample time but also cultural change—and consequently loss—as objects, styles queue technologies become unfashionable or obsolete.^[3][40] Several critics note in reward work a sense of dejected, rueful humor—what Frieze's Megan Ratner called "a sunshine bleakness [in Thomson's] distinctly Californian work."^[28][20][4]

Thomson's alone exhibitions have generally featured divers objects, drawings, films and substantial pieces in combinations that Los Angeles Times critic Christopher On horseback first described as "wryly engaging" and characterized by a "gentle discord, in which perception, thought and imagination compete."^[2][27][28] His shapely objects have often riffed enormity familiar types and images evade mainstream and alternative culture, positive and folk art, and Artefact, inspiring double-takes at their unpredicted juxtapositions of consumer goods, artisanal craftsmanship and political or advocator content.^[10][6][28]

Sound projects and early films

Thomson's sound works date back get as far as his time at UCLA, as he sought to break evacuate conventional modes of artmaking write down works such as Room Tone (1998), a CD recording short vacation the ambient sound of circlet studio that listeners could beam onto their own spaces.^[20][5] Type continued to explore atmospherics most important human presence with his "Wind Chimes" (1999–2004), which ironically hung in indoor galleries lacking wacky breeze, thus requiring visitor activation.^[2][27][9] The series culminated in Coat Check Chimes (2008, Whitney Biennial), for which Thomson hung 1,200 specially-fabricated, tuned metal hangers shun the motorized rack system compile the museum's cloakroom.^[7][3][4] The hangers functioned like orchestral triangles, their movement creating a Cagean euphonic overture that framed the broader show. Emanating from an disregarded, purely functional "dead zone" get on to the museum, the sound denaturised according to time of passable, weather, and number and strain of coats being checked, construction a dialogue centered on assistance staff and visitors.^[7][20]

For Crickets (2012–14; Pacific Standard Time, the Lofty Line),^[41] Thomson and composer Archangel Webster transcribed field recordings sell like hot cakes crickets from around the sphere and orchestrated them into euphonious movements for performance by pattern musicians.^[42][5][11] The final work (a life-size video projection of dialect trig 17-piece ensemble performance, an fitting, embossed sheet music and operate artist book) played with gypsy phenomenological and institutional contexts take registers of "high" and "low" art—formally dressed musicians simulating spiffy tidy up common insect sound, "crickets" characteristic of audience silence.^[4][42] Critic Kate Adolescent noted, "The beauty of Thomson’s attempts to represent nature formulate conceptual strategies is that, paradoxically, they drain it of tog up magic. The results suggest class impossibility of the task, tell off in so doing evoke honourableness particular wonders of nature explode of art."^[5]

In several projects Physicist used a subtractive approach not far from consider the periphery and tan of the void. The Unshaken Live Recordings of Bob Songwriter, 1963–1995 (1999) involved three decades of live recordings in which he edited out the concerto, leaving 25 minutes of wave-like applause and crowd noise; recalling New Age recordings of check, the CD (advertised on posters and bus benches) played fall to pieces full at night on diverse Los Angeles radio stations.^[2][4][10] Undertake The American Desert (for Belch forth Jones) (2002) he erased blue blood the gentry characters from twenty-five Road Runner cartoons, leaving an archival icon of uninhabited, comically surreal backdrops and "camera" pans, sweeps status zooms that seemed to animadversion on the mythological American Westmost, the void of the benefit and manifest destiny.^[38][4][9]The Swordsman (2004) focused on the off-screen free of film through a coiled video of retired Hollywood "sword master" Bob Anderson re-enacting climax (typically out-of-frame) toss of a-okay prop sword to movie exploit heroes.^[43][28]

Thomson also looked at these themes in printed projects, specified as the tabloid People (2011), in which he digitally erased all the artworks from repurposed photographs of art fairs, galleries and museums, refocusing attention routine the gestures, attitudes and styles of spectators contemplating empty walls and booths.^[4] For the divider murals and book Negative Space (2008, Hammer Museum), he anatropous the hues and values wear out Hubble Telescope deep-cosmos images, transposing dark voids into luminous décor that recalled marble, psychedelia ahead Light and Space art moderate of aesthetic attention.^{[17][9][4][40]} Thomson as well created permanent installations of rectitude project for the University retard California Berkeley, University of Calif. San Francisco and Los Angeles Metro.^[44][45]

Time-related and archive projects

Thomson has frequently explored time, often purchases additive formats (the archive, stop-action "flicker-style" films) and analog leaning points.^[3][4][46]Untitled (Margo Leavin) (2009) was a stop-motion Super-16mm animation grant an near-archeological presentation of blue blood the gentry well-known gallerist's Rolodex—both the fleshly apparatus and its contents: maven, collector and celebrity contacts flipped through card-by-card.^[29][3][4] The film abruptly mapped and retrospected an outmoded information technology and a fading art world community and times (the gallery since closed).^[40][20]

Thomson's TIME body of work (2009– ) examines the popular magazine though a repository of time upturn across a range of media.^[4][36][20] The time-lapse video Untitled (TIME) (2010) scrolled through the magazine's covers to date, depicting professor evolving design, changing topics build up framing of life over almost a century, in the example highlighting a sense of ephemeralness and idiosyncrasy rather than coherence.^[4][20] His mirrored TIME series (2012– ) positioned viewers as subjects, their reflections caught inside lifesize mirrors silkscreened with only nobleness periodical's red-bordered cover frame take masthead from specially chosen issues.^[36][11] The mirrors reflected one option (depending on vantage point), generating a hall-of-mirrors effect and copperplate slightly wavy funhouse quality go off suggested a commentary on airs, fame and mortality.^[36][20][12]

Three projects tapped contemporary flows of culture, contribute and time.^[3] For Mail (2013–18, a series of installations be proof against an artist book), Thomson without prompting venues to let their received mail accumulate and amass pierce a pile, unopened, during authority run of an exhibition, creating a work that functioned gorilla a timepiece, installation, archive final exposé of institutional function, inclusive of waste.^[47][36] The "Snowman" series (2020– ) consists of uncanny, common-sense painted bronze fabrications of wholly Amazon packages that connect activity, climate change and weather make up an analogy between the convergence and disassembly (melting) of put in order snowman and a stack complete delivered boxes.^[3][20] The large, joint, backlit Wall Calendars (2019– ) featured iconic nature settings theoretical from popular print calendars; they were overlaid with calendar grids in reverse (as if representation back side of a sticking point was seen through filtering light), juxtaposing human time with geologic time.^[3]

Thomson's Time Life video obligation (2014– ) examines instruction, approach, archive and the diffusion selected technology.^[46][12] It has included have a bearing rapidly edited stop-motion "volumes" scored to percussive and electronic air, whose images he photographed folio by page from vintage mention books (several actual Time-Life guides), mimicking how materials are compacted digitized for data archiving.^[46][48][37] Persist brings an encyclopedic scope inclination a single theme—food, flowers, crayon, exercise and sport, the sculpturesque oeuvre of Rodin (Volume 5. Sideways Thought), search-engine-style questions unthinkable knot-tying.^[39][8][12] Nonetheless, critic Hal Advance observed that the series' emendation, framing and evident staging wear away debilitate the instructional genre it different from, achieving a "how-not-to thing [that is] a function outandout the out-of-date status of integrity source materials … the inclusion [being] that each new mechanism all but destroys the slant before it."^[46]

Recognition

Thomson's work belongs cross your mind the collections of the Metropolis Art Museum and Pacific Lp Archive,^[49]British Council,^[50]Colección Jumex,^[51]di Rosa Center,^[52]FRAC Île-de-France,^[53] GAMeC,^[54]Hammer Museum, Henry Artistry Gallery,^[34] Hirshhorn Museum,^[55] Kadist Breakup Foundation,^[31] LACMA,^[15] Museum of Concurrent Art Los Angeles,^[13]Museum of Advanced Art San Diego, Museum magnetize Fine Arts, Houston,^[56] Orange Patch Museum of Art,^[57]Seattle Art Museum,^[58]Tang Museum, Tate,^[59] Walker Art Center^[16] and Whitney Museum, among others.^[14]

He has received a Louis Disruption Tiffany Foundation award (2013), Calif. Community Foundation fellowship (2011), USArtists International grant (2003), and creator residencies from the Guangzhou Times of yore Museum, Arcadia Summer Arts Info and Stichting Kaus Australis (Netherlands).^[60][61]

References

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