unFRINGEd

I’m not afraid to say it . . I’m a complete uber geek with more pointless gadgets than useful ones. If I had any talent (which I dont) I would wear Steampunk outfits down the middle of King street and talk code to the cyber girls I meet at tweetups.  

And like most of the world can blame Google for making that all the more easier. Google bought the internet into mainstream and made it “funky”. Before Google, there was just search . . and that wasnt enough to impress your work colleagues or your parents. Google made it funky to search the map looking for the house you live in . . the house your ex now lives in (with him …) and see what was happening out the front of your place when the googlemobiles went past. 

Without Google we couldnt stalk the web  it would be harder to find images of the things you want for projects, website and any other medium. Google moved the Internet closer to the home . . presidents needed to pronounce it correctly (If you recall GW Bushes “the googles” speech) and political parties pay to ensure their message is first on any campaign by cyber squatting on competitive keywords. 

So . . naturally the first thing I would see today is the 4th Annual Google Art Exhibition in Enmore road. It’s a given. 

In its new incarnation, Google 2010 has joined forces with The Sydney Fringe Festival, which this year is conveniently subtitled: Be a Black Sheep. 

In addressing both the notion of the outsider and the generation of answers and ideas, Black Sheep attempts to engage with a crucial, creative discourse about how the arts are not simply consumed but also fuelled by the immersive realm of online space. 

The brief is quite simple: Hardware Gallery curators choose a phrase, select 13 artists and then have them all google the phrase…on the same day at the same time. From a single page of results each artist has to select one website and use that site as their sole source of inspiration for a body of work. As with every other year, the results are surprising, witty and sometimes confounding as we push the artists outside their comfort zone in the search for inspiration. 

Many of us grew up being the Black Sheep . . I knew this was going to be wicked cool. 

The works are interesting, intelligent and kinda funky in a Campbells Soup Warhol kinda way, tinged with the overall theme. There is a lot of detail and time taken to capture the theme and some of the key pieces really go all out to demonstrate it. 

The works are distributed across 2 main rooms. the downstairs area features works by Lila Afoiona, Yolanda Elkhouri, Timoty Preston and many others. My favourite from this are was the XMAS lights sheep (top left of this article in quad cam vision.) 

The upstairs section featured more complex works, with the funky wrought iron skateboards (see left) really standing out to me . . I could never skate, so these would hang well with minimal risk to damage. 

And then I spotted it. 

At the front . . near the window. I walked straight past it in my fumbling for the umbrella.

The piece below represents the reality of the  black sheep scenario to the Inner West viewer. The photo really doesnt do it justice (and I felt a bit daft trying to get a better one) . . but this likely represents the dinner table of many an Australian house on the day the shit came down. 

Black Sheep Boy - Mark Wotherspoon. Note the finger pointing . .

What happened, who knows, but you can only guess why the finger pointing and the dark events that bought this mystery to the artist. You can feel the tension over the empty bland dinner table . . . Maybe I take it too seriously . . but this is a compelling piece. Many an Inner Westie came here as an outcast to their original community and likely faced this stark, dark situation . . . .

A really good way to spend an hour.

Black Sheep – The 4th Annual Google Exhibition opens on Tuesday 7th September and runs until 25th September at Hardware Gallery, 263 Enmore Road, Enmore. During the exhibition period, on Friday 24th September Hardware Gallery will host Sound Series #7, the latest in a series of monthly nights of exploratory music and performance which was launched in early 2010. Sound Series sees sound based performance and installation across a broad range of styles, where experimentation is always encouraged.