Mungo Thomson in conversation with Rita Gonzalez at Karma, Los Angeles 2025

A conversation on
Mungo Thomson, Time Life
with the artist and Rita Gonzalez,
Curator and Department Head of
Contemporary Art at LACMA

3 pm Screening of Time Life
4 pm Conversation

Friday
May 30, 2025

Karma
7351 Santa Monica Blvd
Los Angeles

Karma presents a screening of Mungo Thomson’s Time Life followed by a conversation between the artist and Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Rita Gonzalez, on the occasion of Thomson’s exhibition Time Life at 7351 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, on view from May 30–July 19, 2025.

Mungo Thomson approaches mass culture and everyday perceptual experience through a lens of deep time and cosmic scale, implicating the spaces of production and exhibition in ever-widening extrapolations. He has convened an orchestral ensemble to perform a score transcribed from the chirping of crickets, persuaded museums to let their unopened mail pile up in the galleries for the run of an exhibition, made a stop-motion film animation of his art dealer’s Rolodex, and transformed the Whitney Museum’s coat check into an enormous musical instrument by replacing the coat-hangers with custom-made versions modeled on orchestral triangles. Through video, sculpture, installation, and numerous other media, Thomson interrogates time, media, and technology. He lives in Los Angeles.

Rita Gonzalez is Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where she has curated Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement; Asco: Elite of the Obscure; Lost Line: Contemporary Art from the Collection; Agnès Varda in Californialand; and A Universal History of Infamy, among other exhibitions.