Michael Thompson

Michael Thompson (b. 1997, London, Ontario) is a painter living and working in Toronto. Thompson’s paintings connect the evolution of the image — from early darkroom photography through contemporary digital imaging — to the shifting labour conditions across the 20th and 21st century. Rooted in Thompson’s experience at Ford Motor Company where his father and two grandfathers worked before him, he paints from found images wrought with a nostalgic yearning for the handmade and the aesthetics of manual labour more broadly. Thompson positions this nostalgia as an ever-present condition of the alienated worker, now further disconnected from their efforts through the increasing implementation of automation and artificial intelligence in the workplace. Working within a compositional structure that often references the filmstrip, Thompson explores imagistic analogues for the shifting conditions of the image in modernity, a focus which has seen the artist reference iconic American imagery of the Space Race and the figure of Elvis Presley. Thompson’s painted subjects are fractured and stuck between images of a recent past that can never be relived and the inexhaustible drive toward efficient, productive workplaces aided by the latest technologies. In 2019, Thompson completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Western University and became a resident artist at the Slade School of Fine Art in partnership with Camden Art Centre (London). In 2022, he received a Master of Fine Art from the University of Guelph. The artist has been included in exhibitions in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. His first solo exhibition, Chorus Coda, opened at Franz Kaka (Toronto) in 2023. Thompson is included in Greater Toronto Art 2024 at MOCA, Toronto, the artist’s first institutional presentation.