In Mungo Thomson’s latest collaboration with Highpoint Editions, Pocket Universe, the Los Angeles-based conceptual artist focuses on the overlooked and the everyday, and invites the viewer to contemplate what is hiding in plain sight.
Pocket Universe is a series of unique blind embossed artworks created by running Thomson’s pocket change through a printing press with aluminum or copper foil. Printed in collaboration with Master Printer Cole Rogers and Highpoint staff, their reflective surfaces are pristine, making visible every detail of each coin in the fragile foil. The work is the result of pairing two materials close at hand — embossing foil, commonly used in printmaking to achieve metallic effects, and loose coins. The configuration of coins in each artwork is the result of the artist placing the coins in his pocket onto the press bed. The resulting chance-based reliefs call to mind constellations, arrays of planets, or craters in lunar surfaces, whose positioning and movement in outer space are determined by innumerable forces. Even the spaces between the coins become shiny, flawless expanses that are strictly bound by their surrounding constellation.