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, the 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 onsite. 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 Monument #25: 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.

Callum Morton and Senior Curator/Deputy Director Linda Michael are available for interview.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-colour catalogue (available mid-August) with essays by Linda Michael and Justin Paton, a text by architect and art collector Corbett Lyon on Gas and Fuel, and images of the new installations at Heide.