Student Project

Visual Arts Facility Performance Space, UC San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, California 92093

VALS is pleased to present Mungo Thomson. In the words of artist Margaret Morgan, Mungo Thomson is a “polymorphous, bastard conceptualist”—a designation hard to improve on, given the artist’s promiscuously wideranging art. By turns deadpan and caustically sly—he has manufactured Styrofoam antenna balls emblazoned with John Baldessari’s bearded visage and bumper stickers bearing Bruce Nauman’s doxa “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths”—Thomson’s inherently conversational practice both gamely Pop-i_es is often antiaesthetic historical precedents and resituates that generation’s thought experiments in the social realm. In the white cube, Thomson’s interventions pressure their containers by rendering them visible in the absence of other work. Wind Chime (1999) a handmade chorus of wood and copper that responds to movement, _its the space with only the possibility of sound when the air is still. Building on this for the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Coat Check Chimes (2008) involves replacing the Museum’s coat-check hangers with custom-fabricated “tuned” metal hangers that - although peripheral to the galleries—bracket the viewer’s experience of the show.