Mungo Thomson, Monument

Through two emblematic works, the Californian artist inscribes within the long-term structures of time ephemeral images and objects destined for abandonment. Using video, sculpture, and installation, Thomson explores popular cultures and shifts our perspective on the familiar, rendering it suddenly strange. Erected in the courtyard of Lafayette Anticipations, Snowman is a monumental tower inspired by cardboard shipping and postal tubes. Here, packaging materials destined to circulate and then disappear are transformed into a slender bronze sculpture meant to endure. The film Time Life Volume 15. Monument to a Period of Time in Which I Lived is the fifteenth installment in a series of stop-motion animations, each composed of thousands of images taken from books. A succession of candles flashes by like a series of snapshots, drawn in particular from religious texts, art history books, and interior design publications. With Snowman and Time Life Volume 15, Mungo Thomson subverts the very concept of the monument. Inspired by the massive circulation of parcels and images in the contemporary era, these monuments do not commemorate historical events, but rather the everyday experience of a generation—that of the artist—shaped by print media and the transition from the analogue to the digital world