Mungo Thomson

The wide-ranging, multi-media work of Contemporary artist Mungo Thomson is far-reaching, and examines our existential crises within a fast-paced, over-stimulated world. The art of Mungo Thomson is created through a "lens of deep time and cosmic scale, implicating the spaces of production and exhibition along the way in ever-widening extrapolations".

He's assembled an entire orchestra to perform a score transcribed from the chirping of crickets, convinced museums to allow their post mail to pile up for the duration of an exhibition, made a stop-motion film animation of his art dealer’s Rolodex, and even replaced coat-hangers in the Whitney Museum’s coat check with custom-made hangers modeled on orchestral triangles, transforming it into an enormous musical instrument.

Both fun and cruel, the conceptual artist stabs us with a double-edge sword with his person-sized works that are vanity but also vanitas - a memento mori that we are all going to die. Thomson made the simple observation that time happens in a mirror. As one immortalizes oneself in the reflective surface, one stares directly in the face of mortality as the TIME mirror series quietly observes the passing of time.

"Time happens in the mirror, looking into it every day, seeing time happen in your face...The changes in our [aging] selves that time brings to us - the work cruelly tells us that this is the very thing that makes time visible." - Mungo Thomson