Along the traffic network leading out of Melbourne, a series of public sculptures punctuate the journey on the EastLink tollway between Melbourne and Frankston. The one that captures my imagination, my nostalgia every time is the 20-metre tall “hotel”, that by day sits lifeless and by night hints at activity behind the windows. We know it’s a hotel, or meant to look like one, because it is emblazoned with the word in a large and deliberately unremarkable upper-case font. The facade has an equally post-war drab feeling about it. Despite this, its location, its height and its symmetry give it a rather haunting stature. It is neither full-scale, nor is it a model; it is something in between and herein lies the genius of the work. It is mimetic art, and, in this case, it is architecture replicating architecture.
To this day enquiries are still regularly received about how the hotel might be booked, such is its convincing nature and perhaps that unreality reinforced by its appearance on the Violent Femmes 2019 album cover. But it’s not a hotel, it’s the artist Callum Morton’s work of art, of public art. And nostalgia, otherworldliness and abandonment (or perhaps displacement) are precisely some of the emotions that the artist wanted to generate within the viewer. He is quoted as saying: “Motorists will view it from the car as an actual hotel and perhaps over time as a strangely de-scaled prop that has escaped the theme park or film set.”
It is not the only work by the artist that has me hooked; I’m equally drawn to his drive-in movie theatre screen. As much a detailed model as it is a commentary on another time and place, it has changed the way I see real drive-ins – now, I think more of Callum Morton’s work than of the utility of the actual site.
As for the hotel, well, I have never managed to pull over in front of it and sneak a quick walkaround. I would be just as happy to just gaze at it from my stationery car window. And when I do, I’ll share whether it feels any different from the handful of times I’ve stolen a glance while driving by on the other side of the freeway, marvelling at the artist’s deception and the sense of mystery created on that little stretch of highway – with something as simple as a small, brittle structure emblazoned with the word ‘HOTEL’ in red!
By John Albrecht, Managing Director & Head of Important Collections
Top Image: Eastlink – Callum Morton
December 2025