Mungo Thomson: Monument

Lafayette Anticipations presents "Monument", a solo exhibition dedicated to Californian artist Mungo Thomson. Working across video, sculpture, and installation, Thomson draws on popular culture to shift our perspective on the familiar, making it suddenly strange. Through two emblematic works, he inscribes ephemeral images and objects destined to be discarded within the long-term structures of time.

Rising in the foundation's courtyard, Snowman is a monumental tower inspired by cardboard shipping and postal tubes. Packaging made to circulate and then disappear is transformed into a slender bronze sculpture built to endure. Alongside it, the film Time Life Volume 15. Monument to a Period of Time in Which I Lived is the fifteenth instalment in a series of stop-motion animations, each composed of thousands of images taken from books. Here, a succession of candles flashes past like a series of snapshots, drawn from religious texts, art history books, and interior design publications.

Together, the two works subvert the very idea of the monument. Rather than commemorating historical events, they pay tribute to the everyday experience of the artist's generation, shaped by print media, the mass circulation of parcels and images, and the transition from the analogue to the digital world.