Mungo Thomson’s work across video, sculpture, and installation uses and subverts the technologies of consumption and mediation to explore the interpenetration of subjectivity, perception, and cultural memory.
Installed in the courtyard of Lafayette Anticipations, Snowman is a monumental tower inspired by cardboard shipping and postal tubes. Here, packaging materials destined to circulate and then disappear are transformed into a slender bronze sculpture meant to endure. Time Life Volume 15. Monument to a Period of Time in Which I Lived is the latest installment in a series of stop-motion animations, each composed of thousands of images taken from books. A succession of candles flashes by like a series of snapshots, drawn in particular from religious texts, art history books, and interior design publications.
With Snowman and Time Life Volume 15, Thomson subverts the concept of the monument. Inspired by the massive circulation of parcels and images in the contemporary era, these monuments do not commemorate historical events, but rather a generation shaped by print media and the transition from the analogue to the digital world.