Okay, so I realised that I didn't say enough about The Empty Show below. I wanted to talk about some other specific visuals I love on the top floor: the skull/star motifs on pillows, the brilliantly simple addition of the word 'HEY' above 'LADIES' on a toilet door, the trail of sinister blood-red fluffy clouds leading from a sink, across the wall and down into a hole in the floorboards...
To be honest, I just go nuts for walk-through art of this kind in general. Londoners may remember the Museum of the Unknown on the South Bank: I think this was my favourite example ever, and maybe it's no coincidence that this too was a temporary zone. And yes, smarty pants, all museums and galleries are walk-through... But I'm talking the ones that make you feel like you're really exploring a place. Discovering something that maybe not many people know about. Places that remind you of haunted houses, or adventure playgrounds... That kind of structure.
And here's an extract from the background info blurb on the site to let you know why the Empty Show rocks so hard, exactly:
The Brittania sits tucked into the corner of a block occupied by a Department of Defence logistics office and facility: complete with barbed-wire perimeter walls, large satellite dishes and hazardous warnings of high radiation levels. A Land Title search finds the Brittania’s owners to be Tenix Defence Ltd, the largest private contractors to the Australian military.
...
Fourteen stencillers, steel-painters, posterers and muralists pulled together to make a stealthy effort of painting the Brittania’s inside anew... [A]lthough such intervention is essentially political (particularly when considering Tenix!), it’s also about having a muck-about play and a helluva lot of fun.
Best of all is the promise that there will be more Empty Shows. Excellent.
To be honest, I just go nuts for walk-through art of this kind in general. Londoners may remember the Museum of the Unknown on the South Bank: I think this was my favourite example ever, and maybe it's no coincidence that this too was a temporary zone. And yes, smarty pants, all museums and galleries are walk-through... But I'm talking the ones that make you feel like you're really exploring a place. Discovering something that maybe not many people know about. Places that remind you of haunted houses, or adventure playgrounds... That kind of structure.
And here's an extract from the background info blurb on the site to let you know why the Empty Show rocks so hard, exactly:
The Brittania sits tucked into the corner of a block occupied by a Department of Defence logistics office and facility: complete with barbed-wire perimeter walls, large satellite dishes and hazardous warnings of high radiation levels. A Land Title search finds the Brittania’s owners to be Tenix Defence Ltd, the largest private contractors to the Australian military.
...
Fourteen stencillers, steel-painters, posterers and muralists pulled together to make a stealthy effort of painting the Brittania’s inside anew... [A]lthough such intervention is essentially political (particularly when considering Tenix!), it’s also about having a muck-about play and a helluva lot of fun.
Best of all is the promise that there will be more Empty Shows. Excellent.
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