JOHN CALAWAY
RECENT WORK
September 12 - October 9, 2019
THE ART OF JOHN CALAWAY
Surpik angelini
September 2019
Twenty years ago I wrote a reflection which fully resonates with John Calaway’s recent art:
"After nearly a century past, it is difficult to imagine the exhilaration avant-garde creators felt when technology altered their perception of space and time. More difficult yet, is to re-enact the synergy with which their body experienced speed and boundless space, as wheels and wings mechanically extended it. The Futurist and Dadaist poetic tropes of the body seen as an erotic machine attest in some measure to deep transformations in the human psyche. Nowadays, our awareness of such phenomena is blunted by our massive media consumption. We travel super speed highways, fly vast distances, and navigate the Internet in megabits while our daily rituals occur on a much slower pace as if levitating on a lightweight surface of a parallel reality. We seem to be in trance as we perform daily tasks, immersed as we are in an artificially accelerated field around us. It seems like few experiences pierce our clouded self-perception, allowing us to see how we see, feel how we feel, connecting our sensorial body to the outside world.”
Much like the Futurist and Dadaist artists in the past, John Calaway’s inventive artwork is not only transforming current artistic paradigms, but continues to expand the limits of our own imagination and self perception. His creative process is involved in the production of knowledge, exploring advanced digital technology, innovative modeling parameters, robotics, heat emission, lightweight space age materials, and most importantly, generating and assembling harmoniously integrated forms distilled from virtually produced shadows.
From Plato's allegory of the cave to Duchamp’s simulated projections from the Fourth Dimension, the philosophical, metaphysical and cultural implications of the subject of shadows in itself, has proven to be somewhat imponderable and enigmatic, but never as enticing as the untapped universe of Calaway’s visual vocabulary based on “real” synthetic objects’ shadows cast in virtual space.
To my understanding, Calaway transmutes deep technical knowledge into unfathomable and beautiful apparitions that come to inhabit our world as unequivocal works of art. We have every reason to expect further exciting artistic productions when he emphatically announces, “this is only the tip of the iceberg.”
Biography
John Calaway
John Calaway (born 1957, Corpus Christi, TX) is a sculptor and a painter based in Houston, Texas. His three-decade long career as an artist has intertwined with his entrepreneurial work in renewable energy. In the 90’s he was a lead innovator in the creation of computer driven 2D and 3D data visualization. His passion for creating new technology and his gift for taking massive amounts of data and identifying readable patterns are the underpinning of his paintings and sculpture.
Calaway approaches his art with the same kind of driven curiosity that had him excel in new computer technology. After decades of working with found objects and traditional materials such as marble, steel and bronze, Calaway is currently exploring large-scale 3D printing. His printed sculptures can allow for a delicate physicality and grace of form on a massive scale that is unachievable with conventional materials. As he develops sculptures in virtual reality, the cast shadows of these virtual sculptures become a springboard for his paintings. The paintings are intensely physical and read as maps or images of the earth from outer space. Calaway’s paintings explore the beauty of the forms and patterns forms on the micro and the macro level.
Committed to being at the forefront of accelerating technologies, Calaway is currently using hand-held, super high-resolution scanners to capture visual data from any object or surface. This data is then digitally molded and rendered into a 3D model of a sculpture that can be printed to any scale. His sculptures and paintings are fluid meditations on the possibilities of art making in the ever- evolving world of big data.
“I want to free myself from the constraints of armatures and maquettes and think of sculpture like a ballet dancer rather than an engineer. The challenging aspect of this is to manifest physical objects that will withstand the stress of time, while at the same time, have great openness and fluidity. The artist must integrate all aspects of the process.”
Calaway’s work has been shown at the Dallas Contemporary, Blue Star Art Space, Lawndale Art Center, Brookfield at One Allen Center, Winter Street Studios, Sculpture 2000, and Meg Poissant Gallery. He has worked with Flatbed Press in Austin on multiple printmaking series. He was one of the founders of Commerce Street Art Studio. His studio is located in the Acres Homes area of Houston.
(Reproduced with permission of the artist)
Photography by Thomas R DuBrock.