Cal­lum Morton
In Memo­ri­am

Cal­lum Mor­ton is a Mel­bourne artist with a sig­nif­i­cant inter­na­tion­al pro­file whose works explore the emo­tion­al and social impact of our built envi­ron­ment. Known for his trans­for­ma­tion of mod­ernist archi­tec­tur­al forms, he takes exist­ing struc­tures and alters them through destruc­tion, cam­ou­flage, sound, and changes in scale, loca­tion or mate­r­i­al. The result­ing spa­tial and tem­po­ral dis­junc­tions drama­tise the ten­sions between art and life, his­to­ry and the present, and lend his work its char­ac­ter­is­tic melan­choly and humour.

Part site-spe­cif­ic project, part sur­vey show, this exhi­bi­tion draws upon almost twen­ty years of Mor­ton’s work and also presents a num­ber of excit­ing new projects, includ­ing Mon­u­ment #25: Vor­tex, a glass-front­ed shop con­struct­ed by the artist on-site. The shop appears to have been ripped out of the city, car­ry­ing its strange car­go into the gallery a carved stony tun­nel, 5 metres deep, that sucks our vision through its depths to the gar­dens out­side: a worm­hole into the future.

Oth­er new works take their inspi­ra­tion from Hei­de II, the icon­ic mod­ernist build­ing com­mis­sioned by John and Sun­day Reed in the 1960s. A build­ing they thought of as a sculp­ture as much as a home to live in, and envis­aged as tak­ing on the appear­ance of a ruin with­in the land­scape, Hei­de II is a nat­ur­al sub­ject for Mor­ton. He draws upon the idea of it being a trag­ic and haunt­ed place, or a repos­i­to­ry for a series of ghost sto­ries” to cre­ate works that ani­mate the dra­mas and debates asso­ci­at­ed with Hei­de’s history.

Walls con­struct­ed with­in the with­in the gallery in the style of Hei­de II will reori­ent our view­ing expe­ri­ence of var­i­ous archi­tec­tur­al mod­els, includ­ing Gas and Fuel (2002) and Inter­na­tion­al Style (1999), and guide our path through to Vortex.

The exhi­bi­tion will also fea­ture a selec­tion of draw­ings from 1989 to the present day, some of which have nev­er been exhib­it­ed before, orches­trat­ed group­ings of screens and awnings, and sev­er­al sculp­tures dis­played in Hei­de gardens.

This is the first exhi­bi­tion to sur­vey the work of Mor­ton in his home city.