MUNGO THOMSON

Thomson’s practice fuses film, sound, sculpture and photography. His work is known for its engagement with cultural signs and analog materials, and repurposing them into immersive, optical and kinetic experiences.

Background Materials takes as its starting point a new series of wallpaper works. These room-filling installations are built from the pages of the books Thomson uses to make his celebrated Time Life video animations. The Time Life videos use how-to guides, reference encyclopedias, and production manuals as their raw material. The walls of MAKI Gallery will be papered with the pages from books on Auguste Rodin, physical fitness manuals, Ikebana instruction, wine and spirits guides and catalogs of candles.

The latest video in Thomson’s Time Life series, Volume 17. Survival Manual, 2025, is a video animation of a jiu-jitsu match taken from a martial arts instruction manual owned by the artist’s son, Emit Thomson-Tribe, 15, a jiu-jitsu practitioner and drummer. Thomson-Tribe also provides the percussion soundtrack. The exhibition at MAKI Gallery will be the video’s world premiere.

Distributed around the spaces of MAKI Gallery are new, unique lenticular prints, also known as Walking Pictures, an optical photographic technology that embeds multiple images into a single artwork that “animates” as the viewer walks past. These works continue Thomson’s interest in making artworks that are both pictorial and structural, using the kinetics of the viewer/artwork encounter to embed time into the static object. The subjects of Thomson’s Walking Pictures include apple varieties, cocktail mixing, fitness workouts, throwing pottery, the sculptures of Auguste Rodin, step-by-step Ikebana assembly and a candle burning down.

Several of Thomson’s iconic TIME mirror works are also on view, and for the first time, studies for these made from vinyl and reflective mylar on paper. Together these works shuffle and remix cultural signs into immersive optical experiences, whether in towering video animations, room-filling wallpaper installations, individually animating lenticular prints or space-and-viewer-reflecting mirror works.