Callum Morton - In Memoriam

Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2011, 73 pages. Good secondhand copy.

This exhibition catalogue was published to accompany an exhibition of the same title at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne in 2011.This exhibition draws from almost twenty years of work by Callum Morton, a Melbourne artist with a significant international profile whose art explores the personal and social impact of architecture and our built environment. From early drawings of fires and explosions on housing commission flats, to bullet-holed Screens, Awnings and Monuments that memorialise the serial deaths of capitalism and outdated forms of modernity, Morton's works present a melancholic urban archaeology. He salvages fragments and alters them through camouflage, destruction, the overlaying of sound, and changes of scale, location and material. The highly ambivalent objects that result make us think about the relationship between art and life, history and the present, and look again at the ubiquitous structures we see but rarely notice.