Mungo Thomson: Time Life
Karma is pleased to present Time Life, a solo exhibition of eight short videos by Los Angeles-based artist Mungo Thomson. The exhibition will open Saturday, January 14th and run through Saturday, March 4th, 2023.
Thomson’s work is an ontological inquiry into the nature of our shared reality, embedding cosmic scale and geological time into everyday objects. Time Life is a body of work that has occupied the artist for almost a decade: a series of stop-motion animations that use reference encyclopedias, photo books, how-to guides and production manuals as their raw material.
The project imagines these books being scanned by a high-speed robotic book scanner, the type used by universities and tech companies to digitize libraries, and proposes such a device as a new kind of filmmaking apparatus. The New York Times called Time Life a “thrilling accomplishment, adding a new chapter to the long conversation about photographs, mechanical reproduction and ways of seeing.”
Mungo Thomson has had recent solo exhibitions at Karma, New York; Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris; and Isetan Shinjuko, Tokyo. Thomson’s work is held in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museo Jumex, México City; FRAC Île-de-France, Paris; GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy; and BY ART MATTERS, Hangzhou, China, among others.