Glenn Walls, Southern Cross Hotel, 2013, Jet Set Melbourne, City Gallery
Summary
The practice of Melbourne-based artist Glenn Walls encompasses sculpture, installation, drawing, photography and video. It comments wryly on consumerism, lifestyle, design and aesthetics, and often points to and unpicks the double meanings, paradoxes and blind spots embedded in both highly familiar objects and in language.
‘Southern Cross Hotel’ depicts the non-extant international-style building of the mid-20th century that once stood on the corner of Bourke and Exhibition Streets. A symbol of the jet age and urbane postwar sophistication when it was opened in 1961, the Melbourne landmark went under the wrecking ball in 2003, eight years after it closed its doors, having played host to such guests as The Beatles, Fred Astaire and Robert Menzies. Walls’ timber and Perspex diptych, presented as if it were the page spread of a book, combines typography, geometry and bold colour to excavate the history of the site and reassert its original Indigenous ownership. He reminds us that behind our nostalgia for the aspirational moment of the jet age, with its propulsion of Australia into a globalised world of trade, commerce and tourism, is the reality of dispossession for some.
This work was commissioned for the exhibition ‘Jet Set Melbourne’, curated by Simon Gregg and shown at the City Gallery between February and April 2014.
