City Lights, is an exceptional, ambitious and captivating public artwork by Callum Morton, one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists. Produced in collaboration with Monash Art Projects it was curated by Amanda and commissioned for the first Ace Hotel in the Southern Hemisphere. It is also Callum Morton’s first permanent public artwork in Sydney. 

As curator, Amanda developed the artist brief in collaboration with Time & Place and Bates Smart architects, that required artists to achieve a sense of wonder and excitement and provide layers of meaning to be discovered over time that reflect upon the local milieu, to activate the lane and creating something unexpected. Callum Morton was selected from a shortlist of five contemporary artists proposed by Amanda, with his exceptional artwork concept City Lights. Amanda worked closely with Callum Morton and his team, Time & Place and Bates Smart architects to drive, facilitate and manage the artwork development through to completion.

Inspired by local signage discovered during the artist’s meanderings, City Lights conveys the random complexity of urban life and reflects the vibrant local milieu. “Empty signs, like empty shops, are frames that remind us, in an elegiac way, not just of the passing of time, but that the city is always in flux; it’s a machine that keeps moving, expanding and evolving. This work collects them all together in a dense archive, like a series of fragments. They’re a visual representation of compressed time,” says Morton. Influenced by 20th Century architecture that celebrated the unintended beauty of the industrial, City Lights clusters forty-four ‘signs’ in an installation spanning twenty meters along Foy Lane. Shapes created by the programmed LEDs suggest connections between people, places, commerce and infrastructure in the modern city.  The artist had the artwork fabricated and installed by Comcut. The mesmerising lighting sequence uses the special aspects of the lane to generate a series of beautiful “floating abstract drawings” that change the experience of the work for each viewer upon each encounter as it unfolds over time. This durational aspect is unique for art in the public realm.

The Ace Hotel hotel includes a ground floor café, and rooftop restaurant and bar all accessed from Foy Lane, so the activation of the lane by public art was important. Morton’s exceptional artwork is in keeping with the quality of the award winning Ace Hotel architectural and interior design by Bates Smart and David Flack studio with Atelier Ace, as well as the Ace Hotel’s other global offerings, and has become a well-loved landmark in the area.

Artist Representation: Anna Schwartz Gallery / Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

Images: John Gollings