The Insides

By Carrie Miller

Callum Morton’s The Insides is an exhibition about interiors that begins outside. A shop-front awning is installed outside the gallery space and a wall both obstructs access and at the same time creates a corridor leading to its insides.

In keeping with his long-term critical interest in our relationship to our built environment, this exhibition includes a series of works that demonstrate his facility for animating this relationship through creating sculptural objects that replicate, decontextualise, and distort real world things in highly formal but subtly surreal ways.

One to one is a reproduction of a fireplace designed for famed art world couple John and Sunday Reed’s Modernist home. Abstracted from the living organism that is a home, the fireplace becomes as cold as a marble sculpture – stripped of its functional warmth and of its connotations as the home’s hearth. Simultaneously, it is enlivened by the rumbling digestive sounds it emits – giving the object an anthropomorphic quality that suggests a darker purpose to this heartless hearth.

This is another highly resolved exhibition by Morton. The sustained, exacting and scholarly nature of his practice makes it too constrained for those who like their contemporary art wild and wacky. But that’s precisely what makes it a sure bet.

Until July 21

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Paddington

http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/