Mungo Thomson

Sideways Thought

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October 20 - December 17, 2022

Opening on Thursday, October 20, 2022

From 5 to 8pm

galerie frank elbaz, Paris

galerie frank elbaz is pleased to announce Sideways Thought, the gallery’s third exhibition in Paris with Los Angeles artist Mungo Thomson. Thomson’s work is an ontological inquiry into the nature of our shared reality, embedding cosmic scale and geological time into everyday things. The exhibition will include new and recent projects in video and sculpture, and will open Thursday 20 October and run through Saturday 17 December.

Mungo Thomson, Sideways Thought, 2022
exhibition view, galerie frank elbaz, Paris
Photo: Claire Dorn

The video Volume 5. Sideways Thought is part of Time Life, a series of stop-motion animations that use reference encyclopedias, photo books and instructional manuals as their raw material. The project imagines these books being scanned by a high-speed robotic book scanner, the kind used by universities and tech companies to archive libraries. Time Life proposes such a device as a new kind of filmmaking apparatus: a machine making flip-book-like animations, spitting out short anthropological essays while digitizing books for the Internet.

Volume 5. Sideways Thought is a motion study of the complete works of Auguste Rodin, made by aggregating every possible photographic view of Rodin’s sculptures found in books on his work. Thomson assembles 360-degree revolutions around each sculpture, approximating a 3D digital scan of Rodin’s corpus using only 2D analog materials. The original musical score is by Ernst Karel, a musician and sound artist and co-director of the 2020 film Expedition Content.

Mungo Thomson, Volume 5. Sideways Thought, 2020-2022
4K video with sound
Original Score by Ernst Karel
8:09 minutes
Edition of 5 + 2 AP

Several new TIME mirrors, the artist’s signature person-sized mirrors bearing the iconic border and logo of the international newsmagazine, reflect upon the last 100 years: the Person of the Century, the turning of the millennium, and a black-and-white mirror based on the very first issue of TIME, dated March 3, 1923, very nearly 100 years ago. Incidentally this stretch of time brings us back nearly to the time of Auguste Rodin, who died in 1917 in Paris.

Mungo Thomson, Sideways Thought, 2022
exhibition view, galerie frank elbaz, Paris
Photo: Claire Dorn

Mungo Thomson, Sideways Thought, 2022
exhibition view, galerie frank elbaz, Paris
Photo: Claire Dorn

The exhibition will also include a new iteration of Thomson’s Snowman sculptures, stacked trios of Amazon boxes and other shipping cartons cast in bronze and painted in exacting trompe-l’oeil to live outdoors forever.

Mungo Thomson, Sideways Thought, 2022
exhibition view, galerie frank elbaz, Paris
Photo: Claire Dorn/Joshua White

This new Snowman is a vertical tower cast from cardboard tubes that shipped prints and proofs to Thomson’s studio, whose form evokes Tatlin and Brancusi. Snowman is an enduring geological monument to transient commerce that, during the pandemic, became public art for a depopulated world. It also links thematically to Thomson’s project Mail, for which a gallery or museum’s incoming mail accumulates unopened for the run of an exhibition, and which debuted at galerie frank elbaz in 2013.