Night Gallery is pleased to present waxwing, an installation by Augustus Thompson and the artist’s first solo show at the gallery. Thompson’s practice spans a wide array of media, but here he returns to his origins in printmaking with a new series of monotypes. There will be a sound performance scheduled for the last week of the show.
Thompson treats exhibition spaces as relational arenas in which artworks and spatial interventions harmonize and reverberate. These site-specific scenarios detour from and expand upon conventional modes of seeing. Newly erected walls designate paths through the space.
Quotidian images recur in Thompson’s prints. Clippings of domestic interiors and electric cars, iconic modernist sculptures, and scenes from nature are a few examples of subjects rendered in this series. Placed at the center of biomorphic eye shapes, these subjects look out at us while we at them, proposing the unsettling consciousness of looking into a two-way mirror, and ultimately acknowledging the voyeuristic nature of the art show as the exhibition's focus.
Augustus Thompson (b. 1985 in Richlands, Virginia) has exhibited in New York at Room East, Signal, and The Still House Group, and in Los Angeles at Night Gallery and Lock-up International, among other venues. His international exhibitions include the Zabludowicz Collection, London, and Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, in Deurle, Belgium. Thompson received his BFA from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and currently lives between Los Angeles and New York.