In Thomson’s Untitled (TIME) , every front cover of TIME magazine is sequentially projected to scale at thirty frames per second. In a way, this work both examines the construction of history and the history of the influential magazine, which was founded in 1923. In addition to the play on “time”—one of Thomson’s ongoing obsessions—this piece highlights and continues the artist’s encyclopedic impulse, also seen in The White Album (2008), to record the history of the spaces he inhabits.
Mungo Thomson is a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist whose challenging works reveal a fascination with time, space, music, and perceptual phenomena in general. It has been pointed out that Thomson’s work privileges backgrounds: material (the white walls), institutional (the gallery), and historical.
Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle...
Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner...
Blalock resists the immediacy that we have come to expect from photography—that each photograph should communicate its message without delay...
Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall...
At first glance, Cityscapes (2010) seems to be a collection of panoramic photographs of the city of Istanbul—the kind that are found on postcards in souvenir shops...
Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...
Collectors’ Favorites is an episode of local cable program from the mid-1990s in which ordinary people were invited to present their personal collections—a concept that in many ways anticipates current reality TV shows and internet videos...
In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action...
Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors...
The black-and-white photograph Men (055, 065) (2012) depicts two similarly built young men – young and slim, with dark tousled hair and a square jaw line – seated aside one another in identical outfits...
Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall...
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization...
7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...