Cover Up #34

Callum Morton’s ‘Cover-Ups’ will never be revealed. They are integrally, solidly swaddled to provide an ever-shifting possibility of guilt and suspicion. They offer a perpetual mourning for the hidden and repressed. Using the aesthetics of modernism and in particular monochromatic minimalism which came to prominence in the Cold War era of the late 1950s and early 1960s - a smooth, clean symptom of post WWII classical cleansing - Morton reminds us that the so-cool procedures of culture often mask the hot cultural anxieties that lie below the surface.

Callum Morton has been making his ‘Cover-Ups’ for a number of years. Shrouded paintings, veiling statues and draping monument shapes, his objects indicate the hidden, occluded, clandestine, forbidden and censored. As objects of cancellation, they teasingly redact the horrors of culture as visuality and representation is tested, modified, impeached and banished from sight. You are free to imagine, associate and choose which infractious horror it might be. The title itself suggests some thoughts from the geopolitical cesspool, to the fallen-mighty or the mythic, religious and cultural taboo. Stuff that ‘they’ don’t want you to know and see. The stuff various societies have discredited, or just some things that need to be put in mothballs for a while as norms and tolerances adjust and reformulate. Of course one culture’s cover-up might be another’s disclosure.

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