Cal­lum Mor­ton’s newest pub­lic art­work, ​‘City Lights’, launch­es on the back façade of the new Ace Hotel in Foy Lane, Sur­ry Hills, Sydney.

A clus­ter of 44 var­ied, emp­ty light box­es, ​‘City Lights’ forms a dense mass of black steel at heights that draws the eye ever upwards. Each box ref­er­ences a par­tic­u­lar part of the city dis­cov­ered by Mor­ton dur­ing a series of walks through­out 2019. Tight group­ings of box­es light in sequence, up and down the lane, cre­at­ing abstract­ed, illu­mi­nat­ed sil­hou­ettes – a draw­ing that becomes increas­ing illeg­i­ble the more lights are added to the succession.

Not­ing ref­er­ence in the work’s title, Mor­ton said: ” The title ​‘City Lights ​‘is tak­en from Char­lie Chaplin’s 1932 film of the same name, where The Tramp falls in love with a girl who is visu­al­ly impaired and tries to help her restore her sight. Refer­ring on the one hand to the mobile and mar­gin­al wan­der­ings of The Tramp, but equal­ly to the tem­po­rary blind­ness one can feel when lost inside the chaos of the con­tem­po­rary city at the street lev­el, the works legion of emp­ty signs and light frag­ments, echoes this blindness.”

This work was pro­duced in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Monash Art Projects, curat­ed by Aman­da Shar­rad and com­mis­sioned by the Gold­en Age Group for the Ace Hotel by Bates Smart architects.

These colours move in time with the endlessly looping soundtracks. In one a machine keeps trying to shut down over and over again. In another, Siri, the voice of the future, describes things without one. In the final one, the Doomsday clock keeps looping back to its never-ending beginning.
— Callum Morton

An interview with Callum Morton ahead of his exhibition View from a Bridge at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.