- Venue
- David Risley Gallery
- Location
Matt Calderwood has got known for making videos in which he does perilous stunts, like climbing up ladders and chopping away the rungs beneath him with an axe. Some have what he's called an "escape vibe" – testing the body's relationship with environment and materials. The title of this exhibition of sculptures, then, is a double play, because these are sculptures and they project into actual space, rather than video images projected onto a surface, whilst their corporeal presence suggests a continuation of his thinking. The title as description is skewed again by the sculptures being covered in sheets of pale plasterboard that, when a plane is fully lit from the window, blends into the ground of the white walls, leaving shaded trapezoids as figure. So at certain angles the objects recede rather than project but what they always do is jut into, interrupt and put pressure on the person looking at them.
Body
After walking round and between the sculptures a while you realise that they are a uniform height – about two meters – and that their width is often about that of a body. They loom over the viewer and into the zone between body and world. In addition the structures are all angled in some way to the person entering the threateningly crowded space. With their combinations of intrusion and retreat, and thinking back to Calderwood's videos, these could be the concretisations of moving bodies.
Equilibrium
The dissonance between the connotations of the form and those of the materials could make concretisation problematic – bare plasterboard, the stuff of temporary and unfinished construction, conflicts intricately with the monumental weight the shapes imply. The shapes breed a sense of recognition without location – the ghosts of cranes or bridges – like if the Bechers had done abstract line drawings instead of taking photos.
The most important thing about these constructions, which so far has not been mentioned, and what distinguishes them from other formally similar works, is that they are off-balance and would fall if not corrected by tanks of water resting on the short sides. This ingenious set up is what allows the threatening lean into personal space. With no plinths holding them to the ground and the counterweights inconspicuous, toppling feels imminent. In fact the impression of architecture frozen in collapse gave this viewer to segue momentarily to the most iconic images of destruction, the anniversary of which coincides with this exhibition.
The Nineteen Sixties
With that and the Brutalist feel and the fragile balance they do go back to a cold war of brinkmanship – the deliberate creation of risk, of getting out of hand. The period pervades them: architectural ad hocism; Richard Serra's "prop" works; Charlotte Posenenske's galvanised steel structures.
The Future
They are their own things, however, and stand at the end, rather than in the middle, of a trajectory of influence. It is remarkable to feel them manipulating space around you and the interaction of planes rewards repeated and variously-positioned viewings. Let's hope Matt Calderwood continues to experiment in this vein.
