Gavlak is pleased to announce a solo by Mungo Thomson (b. 1969, California). For his first solo exhibition at Gavlak, Mungo Thomson expands on ideas first explored in his Negative Space project, an ongoing series of edge-to-edge photographic wall murals which invert the contents of images taken from the Hubble Space Telescope’s online archive, with a new series of silkscreen prints. These prints use glow-in-the-dark ink to produce images of starscapes based on photos taken by amateur astronomers found online. Thomson replaces the photographic image with vector graphics that recall the do-it-yourself glow-in-the-dark sticker starscapes of childhood, but the logic is reversed: in Thomson's images it is empty space that glows when the lights turn off, not the stars. The result is a nearly invisible image of a night sky in negative that reveals itself when the lights are turned off and the gallery is closed. In this way, like much of Thomson’s work, they subvert – or invert – the exhibition itself.
Mungo Thomson has had solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, The Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, and GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy. Recent group exhibitions include the 2008 Whitney Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Cinema Effect at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., The Possibility of an Island at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, The 8th Panama Biennial in Panama City, Panama, Nothingness and Being at Collecion Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico, and Compilation IV at Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Dusseldorf, Germany. In 2010 Thomson will exhibit at the Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, Washington, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, and Castello di Rivoli, Torino, Italy.
