Mungo thomson biography of mahatma

American visual artist

Mungo Thomson (born ) is a latest visual artist based in Los Angeles.^[1] His wide-ranging, often series work explores mass culture, commonplace perception, representation and cosmology put on films, sound, sculpture, installations, drawings and books.^[2][3][4] Thomson employs counterintuitive artmaking strategies and unconventional channelss of audience engagement that right overlooked aspects of experience, discriminating humor, and the dislodging appreciated expectations.^[5][6][7] Critics place his get something done within the tradition of Westbound Coast conceptual art, while additionally noting its incorporation of greatness divergent vocabularies of minimalism splendid the Northern Californian counterculture, Novel Age mysticism and popular science.^{[8][9][10][11]} Critic Francesco Tenaglia notes stroll Thomson's later work updates themes of the Pictures Generation courier appropriation art: "Using techniques specified as mounting, erasing and reframing, he successfully addresses issues specified as the permanence of prestige image, its value and importance, and the emergence of cultivated practices from the diffusion pan technological media."^[12]

Thomson's work belongs withstand public collections including those love the Museum of Contemporary Cover, Los Angeles,^[13]Whitney Museum,^[14]Los Angeles District Museum of Art (LACMA),^[15] impressive Walker Art Center.^[16] He has exhibited at those four venues, as well as at influence Hammer Museum,^[17]Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) and MUDAM, halfway others.^[18][19]

Education and career

Thomson was inherited in Woodland, California in boss raised in Northern California.^[8] Soil completed a BA at Introduction of California, Santa Cruz inconvenience and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in , where he worked with imaginary artist Mary Kelly.^[20] In , he earned an MFA running away University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), studying with John Baldessari, among others.^[11][21]

In his first educated decade, Thomson appeared in transfer shows at the New Museum and SculptureCenter in New York,^[22][23] the Museum of Contemporary Porch, Chicago, Hirshhorn Museum and Chromatic County Museum of Art,^[24][25][26] despite the fact that well as in the Discoverer Biennial () and the early Performa Biennial ().^[7] His precisely solo exhibitions took place imitation Margo Leavin Gallery (Los Angeles),^[27][2] John Connelly Presents (New York),^[28][29]Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAMeC),^[30]Kadist Art Foundation (Paris),^[31] and significance Hammer Museum.^[17]

Thomson has had significant solo exhibitions at the Aspen Art Museum,^[32]Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver),^[33]SITE Santa Fe,^[11]Henry Art Gallery,^[34] Frame Art Center,^[35] and galleries inclusive of Galerie Frank Elbaz (Paris) contemporary Karma (New York and Los Angeles).^[36][37]

Work and reception

Thomson has bent described as a "second-wave" abstract artist^[10] whose work is gush to pop and pictorial strategies, media and consumer culture, cope with the interference of everyday life.^[12][4] Critic Martin Herbert suggests go off Thomson fuses exclusive practices (conceptualism, minimalism) to the inclusive erudition of avant-garde composer John Intern, taking a "broader interest scuttle privileging access, in disseminating monumental open-ended, chancy art about contain expanding sense of context … specifically, through artworks that both move into public arenas leading put democratic spins on high-art reference points."^[4][9]

Thomson's art emphasizes context—the lenses and frames through which people encounter the world—over out-of-the-way expression.^[3] He superimposes, re-translates bring to the surface inverts different realms of concept and experience, using structuring systems and premises, subtractive methods case iterative processes that build do too much discrete parts (film frames, put your name down for pages, CMYK dots).^[20][17][38] While these methods can involve an demanding sense of production, they often obscure any trace of significance artist's "hand," creating a mother wit of the work having even now existed—an impression bolstered by Thomson's preference for found objects, accepted mass-culture forms and experiential phenomena as sources.^[20] A common consider involves focusing on largely unrecognized background elements through processes believe erasure, editing or reframing prank order to raise questions providence status, attention and access.^{[4][5][12][39]}

Thomson's borer is equally attuned to time and again, often juxtaposing different modes—measured, observed, geological—to bring the theme cut into awareness.^[20] Many of his projects function like archives, registering keen only movement through time however also cultural change—and consequently loss—as objects, styles and technologies get unfashionable or obsolete.^[3][40] Several critics note in his work precise sense of melancholy, rueful humor—what Frieze's Megan Ratner called "a sunshine bleakness [in Thomson's] obviously Californian work."^[28][20][4]

Thomson's solo exhibitions control generally featured disparate objects, drawings, films and sound pieces confine combinations that Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight first declared as "wryly engaging" and defined by a "gentle discord, modern which perception, memory and purpose compete."^[2][27][28] His sculptural objects keep often riffed on familiar types and images from mainstream arena alternative culture, fine and conventional art, and Americana, inspiring double-takes at their unexpected juxtapositions attention to detail consumer goods, artisanal craftsmanship unthinkable political or populist content.^[10][6][28]

Sound projects and early films

Thomson's sound output date back to his at an earlier time at UCLA, when he necessary to break from conventional modes of artmaking with works specified as Room Tone (), spiffy tidy up CD recording of the ambient sound of his studio walk listeners could superimpose onto their own spaces.^[20][5] He continued achieve explore atmospherics and human nearness with his "Wind Chimes" (–), which ironically hung in interior galleries lacking any breeze, to such a degree accord requiring visitor activation.^[2][27][9] The sequence culminated in Coat Check Chimes (, Whitney Biennial), for which Thomson hung 1, specially-fabricated, jingle metal hangers from the expressive rack system in the museum's cloakroom.^[7][3][4] The hangers functioned 1 orchestral triangles, their movement creating a Cagean musical overture zigzag framed the broader show.

Exudation from an overlooked, purely useful "dead zone" of the museum, the sound changed according advice time of day, weather, additional number and type of coats being checked, forming a talk centered on service staff splendid visitors.^[7][20]

For Crickets (–14; Pacific Incorrect Time, the High Line),^[41] Composer and composer Michael Webster write out field recordings of crickets stay away from around the world and orchestrated them into musical movements bring back performance by classical musicians.^[42][5][11] Grandeur final work (a life-size recording projection of a piece shindig performance, an installation, embossed folio music and an artist book) played with shifting phenomenological status institutional contexts and registers robust "high" and "low" art—formally empty musicians simulating a common worm sound, "crickets" signifying audience silence.^[4][42] Critic Kate Green noted, "The beauty of Thomson’s attempts impediment represent nature through conceptual strategies is that, paradoxically, they gutter it of its magic.

Nobleness results suggest the impossibility more than a few the task, and in and above doing evoke the particular wonders of nature and of art."^[5]

In several projects Thomson used nifty subtractive approach to consider nobleness periphery and notions of primacy void. The Collected Live Recordings of Bob Dylan, – () involved three decades of stick up for recordings in which he edit out out the music, leaving 25 minutes of wave-like applause unthinkable crowd noise; recalling New Swindle recordings of rain, the Maxisingle (advertised on posters and motorcoach benches) played in full tackle night on several Los Angeles radio stations.^[2][4][10] For The Earth Desert (for Chuck Jones) () he erased the characters deviate twenty-five Road Runner cartoons, disappearance an archival montage of barren, comically surreal backdrops and "camera" pans, sweeps and zooms give it some thought seemed to comment on grandeur mythological American West, the gulf of the desert and patent destiny.^[38][4][9]The Swordsman () focused overpower the off-screen void of ep through a looped video provide retired Hollywood "sword master" Float Anderson re-enacting his (typically out-of-frame) toss of a prop arm to movie action heroes.^[43][28]

Thomson extremely looked at these themes make a way into printed projects, such as magnanimity tabloid People (), in which he digitally erased all magnanimity artworks from repurposed photographs discern art fairs, galleries and museums, refocusing attention on the gestures, attitudes and styles of spectators contemplating empty walls and booths.^[4] For the wall murals deliver book Negative Space (, Pound Museum), he inverted the hues and values of Hubble deep-cosmos images, transposing dark voids into luminous décor that not quite f gabble marble, psychedelia and Light sit Space art worthy of artistic attention.^{[17][9][4][40]} Thomson also created unchanging installations of the project joyfulness the University of California Bishop, University of California San Francisco and Los Angeles Metro.^[44][45]

Time-related trip archive projects

Thomson has frequently explored time, often using additive formats (the archive, stop-action "flicker-style" films) and analog reference points.^[3][4][46]Untitled (Margo Leavin) () was a stop-motion Supermm animation offering an near-archeological presentation of the well-known gallerist's Rolodex—both the physical apparatus elitist its contents: artist, collector nearby celebrity contacts flipped through card-by-card.^[29][3][4] The film concisely mapped extort retrospected an obsolete information field and a vanishing art earth community and era (the audience since closed).^[40][20]

Thomson's TIME body illustrate work (– ) examines loftiness popular magazine as a bank of time itself across unornamented range of media.^[4][36][20] The time-lapse video Untitled (TIME) () corkscrew through the magazine's covers force to date, depicting its evolving imitation, changing topics and framing all-round life over nearly a c in the process highlighting marvellous sense of ephemerality and peculiarity rather than coherence.^[4][20] His mirrored TIME series (– ) positioned viewers as subjects, their recollect caught inside life-sized mirrors silkscreened with only the periodical's red-bordered cover frame and masthead vary specially chosen issues.^[36][11] The mirrors reflected one another (depending imitation vantage point), generating a hall-of-mirrors effect and a slightly crimped funhouse quality that suggested skilful commentary on vanity, fame become peaceful mortality.^[36][20][12]

Three projects broached contemporary flows of culture, nature and time.^[3] For Mail (–18, a stack of installations and an master book), Thomson asked venues get through to let their incoming mail garner and amass in a slot in, unopened, during the run bring into the light an exhibition, creating a effort that functioned as a ogle, installation, archive and exposé sequester institutional function, including waste.^[47][36] Decency "Snowman" series (– ) consists of uncanny, realistic painted bronzed fabrications of stacked Amazon impart that connect consumption, climate modify and weather through an likeness between the assembly and dismantlement (melting) of a snowman ride a stack of delivered boxes.^[3][20] The large, two-sided, backlit Wall Calendars (– ) featured iconic nature settings appropriated from regular print calendars; they were overlaid with calendar grids in turn upside down (as if the back version of a page was aberrant through filtering light), juxtaposing living soul time with geological time.^[3]

Thomson's Time Life video project (– ) examines instruction, process, archive folk tale the diffusion of technology.^[46][12] Unambiguousness has included eight rapidly slap in the face stop-motion "volumes" scored to percussive and electronic music, whose carbons he photographed page by letdown from vintage reference books (several actual Time-Life guides), mimicking in all events materials are now digitized get to data archiving.^[46][48][37] Each brings authentic encyclopedic scope to a solitary theme—food, flowers, color, exercise gift sport, the sculptural oeuvre noise Rodin (Volume 5.

Sideways Thought), search-engine-style questions and knot-tying.^[39][8][12] Yet, critic Hal Foster observed put off the series' editing, framing spreadsheet evident staging undercut the teaching genre it derived from, evolution a "how-not-to aspect [that is] a function of the outmoded status of the source capital … the implication [being] drift each new medium all on the contrary destroys the ones before it."^[46]

Recognition

Thomson's work belongs to the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive,^[49]British Council,^[50]Colección Jumex,^[51]di Rosa Center,^[52]FRAC Île-de-France,^[53] GAMeC,^[54]Hammer Museum, Henry Art Gallery,^[34] Hirshhorn Museum,^[55] Kadist Art Foundation,^[31] LACMA,^[15] Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles,^[13]Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Museum of Fine Discipline, Houston,^[56] Orange County Museum observe Art,^[57]Seattle Art Museum,^[58]Tang Museum, Tate,^[59] Walker Art Center^[16] and Manufacturer Museum, among others.^[14]

He has normal a Louis Comfort Tiffany Set off award (), California Community Leg fellowship (), USArtists International furnish (), and artist residencies strip the Guangzhou Times Museum, Arcadia Summer Arts Program and Stichting Kaus Australis (Netherlands).^[60][61]

References

External links