Gas and Fuel
(2002)
- Artist/s name
- Callum MORTON
- Medium
- wood, synthetic polymer paint, aluminium, digital print on transparent synthetic polymer resin, paper, CD, audio unit
- Measurements
- (a-r) 200.5 x 599.4 x 130.2 cm (installation)
- Place/s of Execution
- Melbourne, Victoria
- Accession Number
- 2004.359.a-r
- Credit Line
- National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented through the NGV Foundation from the Corbett and Yueji Lyon Collection by Corbett and Yueji Lyon, Fellow, 2003
© Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery - Gallery Location
- Gallery 11
Level 2, NGV Australia
Callum Morton's works or installations sit somewhere between architecture and sculpture. They explore our interaction and relationship with the built environment, and how we encounter, perceive or experience personal and communal space.
The Gas and Fuel buildings were a pair of utilitarian high-rises that were much maligned by the public and demolished in 1996–1997 to make way for Federation Square in Melbourne’s city centre. In Gas and Fuel, Morton revisits these buildings with a sense of irony and pathos in his 1:34 scale model.
The model includes a barely audible voice, activated from within one of the towers. The words ‘Help me. Please help me!’ were taken from the soundtrack from the final scene of the 1958 movie The Fly, where the insect-sized man-fly, trapped in a spiders web, pleads for a rescue that won’t ever come.
