Piles, Pools and Projections

A repertoire of pratfalls has been enacted upon a series of outdoor cinema screens. These nostalgic monuments of the golden years offer the artist a blank canvas on which to project. But it is as though the actors in the film we were watching have stepped out of the screen and have thrown a cream pie in the face of our expectation. Plainly, the world is neither neutral nor predictable—not even an ideal one. The gallery looks like a treatise on hypochondriac aesthetics and complaint. Callum Morton shows us that the formal hygiene and orderliness of modernism will indeed spring a leak when faced with the messy contingencies of our lives and that the leak in itself is something worthy of our attention. Like the comedian who cannot walk past a telephone without getting tangled in its cord, or past a swimming pool without falling in it, Morton’s sculptures tend towards entropy, erosion (or explosion) of the ideal. Elsewhere, organic accumulations appear as ends in themselves. The dumb genius of a pile of dirt. Though, as is often the way, there’s something strange going on somewhere inside that distracts our attention from perhaps more serious concerns.

—Amanda Rowell

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Callum Morton is one of three artists representing Australia at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Morton was selected for the Busan Biennale in 2006 and the Indian Triennial in 2004. Other group shows include: High Tide: Currents in Contemporary Australian Art at Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw and the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2006); the 2nd Istanbul Pedestrians Exhibition (2005); the 2nd Auckland Triennial (2004); Face Up: Contemporary Art from Australia, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2003). Solo museum exhibitions include Babylonia at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2005), More Talk about Buildings and Mood at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2003) and International Style at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles (1999). Callum Morton has been exhibiting with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery since 1998.