Further Down the Line is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Mungo Thomson.
Mungo Thomson’s practice draws upon the expanse of popular culture to examine the human condition as it is perceived through both conscious and subconscious states of being. The apparent vastness of Thomson’s field of investigation is reflected in his work’s heterogeneity, which operates
across the areas of film, photography, sculpture, sound, bookmaking, and installation. Seriality and repetition are modes of working for the artist that embody a levity linked to a lineage of West Coast
artists, including John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha. Yet his reiterated variations are meditations on time, more closely tethered to aspects of technology and notions of obsolescence. While at times recalling
art history, they reverberate through spiritualism, wandering cosmologies, and the seemingly arcane.
For his exhibition at Further Down the Line, the artist presents Fireplace, a modified image using lenticular printing – a technique that infuses multiple images into one still picture, allowing it to animate in tandem with the viewer’s movement. This performative technology has its roots in the turning
pictures that arose in 16th-century Europe, long before it was assimilated by machines and widely popularised in the commercial industries. At the height of its visibility, between the 1950s and 1990s, it appeared ubiquitously on cards found in cereal boxes and other collectable treats.
Fireplace deploys lenticular printing to depict a stack of logs that appears either burning or unlit depending on the viewer’s vantage point. Traversing both the pictorial and structural, the work operates at the threshold between the stillness of images and the temporal dimension of its
presentation – here proposed as a domestic setting within the inherently public conditions of display.
Part of a series of work aptly titled Walking Pictures, Fireplace draws from a databank of imagery that has been the subject of an encyclopaedic grouping of films titled Time Life. Split into volumes, the films discharge a disorientating array of pictures taken from books and manuals, ranging from cooking,
exercising, and gardening to art making, asking questions, and tying knots.
Thomson’s work conflates the two dimensional and three dimensional to abridge the worlds of analogue and digital. In its polyvalent nature, it proposes a counterforce to the gluttony and onslaught
of AI and sublimates the temperament in which information is propagated in our digital age. His enduring creations trace our history as ways to reimagine both our present and future.
