Glasgow Show

Ghosts of the house

Deep into the footsteps of time and beyond the threshold of the front door. Up the winding stairwell, the layout of a flat turns its head to us; a hallway becomes a boulevard, rooms take on the form of neighbourhoods. The flat becomes a city, the tenement becomes a country and Glasgow becomes the world.

An excess of TV stands, a mattress, and some bicycles; and an ever amounting pile of things, an infinitely short pause in the lifespan of objects. We have all lived here, but here we are not, filtered through, some things piled up, and passed on. Becoming like shortly rented stonehendges, unsure of who brought them and where they will go . A sculptural sundial of the interior variety is powered and filled with our fluorescent imaginations of the lives lived within these partitioned interiors.

Through the creation of a grand displacement. With this series of overlapping blueprint-like logics McCallum establishes a mischievous sculptural inventory, a sandbox like methodology in the gallery. Who keeps track of what is to come?

Life on the curb, objects here become oracles to our discontent of space. They capture a blink in the lifespan of an object. Their contents emptying out, our affection falls apart and into moving vans. The show operates as a vast ship sailing backwards through time. The Glasgow Show is a testament to a domestic archaeology. A sculptural archive of the everyday, here and now, future and past. Dissecting partitions of the social landscape, the categories of our object-obsessed accumulation fall out like an open stomach surgery. It is all out in the open now. We can’t hide anywhere.

Each object becomes an actor, telling their story through rubs, patina, and gentle encounters. Tenuous occupations of labour and space here reveal a spatial complex of a contemporary sculptural understanding, a drive to a collected condition of ubiquity. Far from not speaking they say everything: who lived here, who did what. The ghosts of the house are sculptures of the city. An inventory or stand in of the contemporary artist-worker-friend. These here stand on top of each other, regimented in their uniformity, infinite in their possibilities.

Text by Simon Shim Sutcliffe.