Matt Calderwood
Artist Matt Calderwood's (b. 1975) primarily video-based practice is a reference for a series of sculptural works he presented. Cheaply constructed with wooden frames and a cladding of pale plasterboard, each piece incorporates into its design one or more plastic barrels of water without which it would not stand up. With this in mind, concerns apparent in Calderwood's previous work-balance, danger, risk, and instability-begin to reveal themselves. A series of associations come to mind, like music and physical theater, the spatial investigations of Vladimir Tatlin, and those incomplete and strangely brutal architectural supports that populate highway construction sites. The concept of failure seems pertinent to contemporary practice, operating across different models of address and definition: be it turning attention to failed promises and myths of the Avant Garde; setting out to realise assumed impossible tasks; or working with inadequacies of language and representation.