Mirrors

 

This Week on Tumblr: Neon

http://artistsbooksandmultiples.tumblr.com/tagged/neon

Prints as Last Minute Presents (Toronto, Vancouver, New York City, Edinburgh)

Mungo Thomson
Negative Space (STScI-PRC2012-26f)
Vancouver, Canada: Contemporary Art Gallery, 2015
22 x 22", Archival inkjet print
Edition of 20 signed copies

Available for $200.00 here, where you'll also find affordable editions by Damian Moppett, Kay Rosen, Rodney Graham and others.

Kelly Mark
Frankfurter 5 
Toronto, Canada: Nothing Else Press, 2013
30.5" x 31" inkjet on archival paper
Edition of 20 signed and numbered copies

Available for $350, here, alongside multiples by David Shrigley, Jonathan Monk, Micah Lexier, Cary Leibowitz, Jon Sasaki, Vanessa Maltese, and many others.

Maggie Groat
Fragmented abstractions, non-representational visions, one-sided cubes, forms, lines, and other moments of mystical clarity 
Toronto, Canada: Paul+Wendy Projects, 2013
22 x 30" Archival digital print (Ultrachrome HDR Ink on Hahnemuhle Fine Art Paper)
Edition of 20 (+ 2 AP) signed and numbered copies

Available for $150, at Paul + Wendy Projects, here, where you'll also find affordable prints by Kay Rosen, Michael Dumontier, Daniel Eatock, Neil Farber and many others.

Katie Paterson
All The Dead Stars
Edinburgh, Scotland: Merkske Books, 2012
uncoated paper offset printed in black, sleeve
99 x 66 cm (map sheet)
12.4 x 22 cm (folded)
Edition of 100 signed and numbered copies

A map documenting the locations of just under 27,000 dead stars – all that have been recorded and observed by humankind.

Available here, for 120.00 pounds.

André Saraiva
New York I Love You
New York City, USA: Creative Time,
22" x 30"Silk print on coventry rag.
Edition of 50 signed copies

"This print is based on my Dream Concert series. For Creative Time, I wanted to create a fantasy lineup of the city's iconic figures. The people included are the reason I always dreamed of coming to New York."

- André Saraiva

Available here, for $350.00 US.

Mungo Thomson | Time, People, Money, Crickets

[Mungo Thomson]
Time, People, Money, Crickets
Santa Fe, USA/Vancouver, Canada: SITE/CAG, 2013
200 pp., 22 x 28 x 1.5 cm., hardcover
Edition size unknown

The first monograph for LA-based artist Mungo Thomson takes its format from the Time-Life mass-market mail-order books from the sixties and seventies. The "Time" of the title refers to a series of works Thomson began in 2009, using Time Magazine as a starting point. These include a number of drawings of the logo, over-sized mirrors and a video work.

The two-and-a-half-minute video features every cover the periodical has produced, at a rate of 30 per second. It showed in Toronto recently, as part of a group exhibition at G Gallery. The mirrored works take the premise of the novelty mirror which allows the viewer to insert himself onto the cover of the magazine (picture Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, staring into a "Man of the Year" issue in the home of millionaire Jeffrey Lebowski).  Thomson produced pairs of these mirrors, oversized (74 x 56 inches) and positioned them across from each other in the gallery, creating a kind of visual infinity as a magazine cover-story.

People is a series of images Thomson has reworked from professional event photographers' pictures of gallery openings. The artist has removed the art from the walls and floors with photoshop, leaving the people behind, seemingly pondering nothing. These images were made into a magazine which mimicked the size, page count and paper stock of the weekly glossy tabloid People. The project was distributed through the mail and exhibited as a take-away. For more information, see previous post, here.

Crickets is a transcription of the sound of a field recording of the insects, notated for a 17-piece classical ensemble. See the previous post, here.

Other works include turning the gallery coat check hangers into wind-chimes, several inflatable projects and a series of large scale photographs of the universe printed in photo-negative (a technique he also applies to Nam June Paik's infamous blank leader Zen for Film, turning the dust and scars on the celluloid into glowing stars).

Throughout the book we see examples of Thomson's appropriation of familiar publication formats: the title itself, People Magazine, National Geographic, religious tracts, and the (admittedly much lesser-known) music scores by Editions Peters. It's one of the more impressive monographs on a young artist that I've seen in the last few years.

The title is available for the special 'exhibition' price of $25 at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, for the rest of this week. The exhibition closes this Sunday, August 30th.

For more information, visit their site, here.

Mungo Thomson | Crickets

Mungo Thomson/Michael Webster
Crickets
Zurich, Switzerland: JRP|Ringier, 2013
Score by
88 pp., 12 x 9", softcover
Edition size unknown

I didn't have any artists' books on my Xmas list this year (I didn't write one) so I wasn't expecting any under the tree, but my sister-in-law heard something on CBC that she thought I would be interested in, and ordered a copy to arrive in time. It was a very pleasant surprise, as I knew of the work (it's featured in a recent monograph on Thomson's work published by The Contemporary Art Gallery of Vancouver) but not that the score was available as a publication. Unbeknownst to her, I am working with the artist on two projects later this year.

Thomson, whose work is often about silence and blank space, nods to John Cage in both the premise and the design of the publication. The simple yellow cover borrows the layout from Edition Peters, Cage's publisher, and - in particular - the blank (or tacet) score for 4'33". The work itself is a transcription of field recordings of crickets. In radio, cinema, and television complete silence is known as 'dead air' and is strictly verboten. The sound of crickets are often used instead of actual silence, to denote an absence of sound. Similarly, stand up comedians refer to crickets as the sound of an audience neither laughing nor applauding, but still in their seats, when a joke bombs.

Working with composer Michael Webster, Thomson had the sound of cricket songs orchestrated for a 17-person classical ensemble of flutes, violins, clarinet and percussion.  The percussionists play cowbell, floor tom, maraca, bells, woodblock and a variety of other instruments to mimic the insects 'chirps', which are used as mating calls (typically performed by the male), or as post-copulation celebratory songs.

The score contains 25 chapters, or "movements," such as "10. Senegal, near Oukout, August 1992, during twilight in a palm grove" or "Reunion Island, near Pavillion at 400m altitude, February at dusk in trash and bushes".

For more information, visit the artist's website, here.

Mungo Thomson | Antenna Baldessari

Mungo Thomson
Antenna Baldessari
New York City, USA: Printed Matter, 2002
2" in diameter
Edition of 500

Thomson pays tribute to his former professor at UCLA in a work made as a fundraiser for Printed Matter and the Art Book Fair.


"Mungo Thomson: John Baldessari had a big effect on me before we ever met or worked together. He was the first artist I looked at, as a very young and struggling art student, and thought that making art could actually be fun, not just gut-wrenching. It was a huge relief. And his work still hits me like that.

To me, John has been able to somehow balance intellectual inquiry with a desire to be entertained. His work is serious, but first it is usually “taking the piss”, as your people like to say. And these are things I take from him. Balancing contradiction, making odd connections, going after “bad ideas”, engaging in exercises as the work, and doing it all with good humor and generosity, above all for himself, was very influential, and very permissive.

Adam Carr: The importance of Baldessari as a tutor, or guide, was exemplified in the work Antenna Baldessari, in which you had foam antenna balls resembling Baldessari manufactured that could subsequently be found adorning car arials around LA. Could you speak about this particular piece?

Mungo Thomson: He has also been very important to an in-between generation of artists and teachers who were important to me, like Jim Welling and Lari Pittman, who were his students at CalArts. And there are also LA artists that I didn’t study with but who studied with John and whose work had an impact on me, like Stephen Prina and Christopher Williams. And there were all my fellow students, legions of us. Basically John has an army, like Jack-in-the-Box and The LA Dodgers (though smaller of course), and those institutions have their $5 foam antenna ball heads driving all over LA. So Antenna Baldessari came out of that."

- from Between Projects: An interview with Mungo Thomson by Adam Carr 

Mungo Thomson | People

Mungo Thomson
People
Los Angeles, USA: Los Angeles Nomadic Division, 2011
132 pp., 27 x 20 cm., staple-bound
Edition size unknown

Continuing his ongoing exploration of backgrounds and negative space, Thomson produced a magazine in the style of glossy tabloid periodicals such as People and Us Weekly depicting art patrons in galleries. Thomson digitally removed the artworks on the wall, leaving only the audience (some attentive, some bored, see above) against blank white walls. The page count, paper stock, and size of the publication is identical to the tabloid People.

The work was initially distributed free of charge, unannounced by mail, to visitors of LAND or through web requests.

NYC Art Book Fair: Mungo Thomson's Antenna Baldessari

Mungo Thomson
Antenna Baldessari
New York City, USA: Printed Matter, 2002
2" in diameter
Edition of 500

A fundraising edition for the fair, these screen-printed portraits of John Baldessari are available for $10.00.

Mungo Thomson | People magazine

Mungo Thomson
People
Los Angeles, USA: Los Angeles Nomadic Division, 2011
132 pp., 10-½” x 7-7/8”, staple-bound, glossy, colour

Free magazines (for subscribers to LAND) containing images of gallery goers with the artworks removed.

Mungo Thomson | Negative Space

Mungo Thomson
Negative Space
Zurich, Switzerland : Christoph Keller Editions / JPR | Ringier, 2006
[160] pp. 25.5 x 17.5 cm., wrappers

An artist book that mimics the format of National Geographic magazine, containing images of black holes, distant galaxies, solar systems and supernovae, which the artist culled from a copyright-free site featuring photographs taken from the Hubble Space Telescope. Thomson then simply reversed the images (a simple function in Photoshop - Command+i), removing the darkness from space. To illustrate, the last image here is the 2nd shot reversed.

The book is available from amazon, here. The negative space font can be downloaded from the artist's site here, and a negative cosmos screensaver here.

Thomson discusses the project, here:

http://hammer.ucla.edu/watchlisten/watchlisten/show_id/30829