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Empty.
20th April 2004, 9.31pm

I went to see the latest Empty Show exhibition tonight. The way it works is they find an empty building somewhere, then go in and make art in it. Paint the walls, make sculpture out of the debris, that sort of thing. Kind of a cross between squatting and a gallery. This one's a giant half-demolished factory in Fitzroy. The show was launched, or whatever curatorial term's most appropriate for the bit where you go in and put all the art up, last weekend, I think, and since then new art has been added by other contributors. I particularly liked the round-bodied cartoony spiders that were spray-painted on almost every corner (and there are a lot of corners in a half-demolished factory), but the chalk outline of the giraffe on the floor of the empty skip bin was also impressive - doubly so because of the recent rain that had formed puddles between the outlines to create a rust-coloured giraffelike spotty pattern. Other goodies included a twenty-foot-long wall covered with a blue and green abstract with eyes embedded in the pattern, reminiscent of Kieth Haring's work; the back room where a giant man in a radiation suit was painted onto the back wall, holding a cascade of comic pages that you could pull down and take home; the robot built out of heating units that sat dangling its legs over the edge of the first floor, looking down onto the main factory floor; and the giant texta outline of a man and a stork, the man holding a spraycan, the spray from the nozzle simulated by a cluster of bright red insulated wires flowing into the centre of the room from the point where they were stuck to the wall.

Don't know how long it'll be around for. I'm shite with directions, but if I remember correctly the factory is on Young Street, one block from Brunswick street heading East, near the corner of Young and Kerr. Here's a potentially useless map. If you can't find it on Young St, have a bit of a wander - it'll be within a block somewhere. It's Definitely that side of Brunswick St.

For those not anywhere near Melbourne, photos of the show will inevitably turn up at the Empty Show site, I'm sure.

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