BAR·ME·CID·AL: providing only the illusion of abundance; illusory or imaginary and therefore disappointing.Mike Golby and Jillian Kay Ross opened Barmecidal Projects Gallery's FREE 4 ALL exhibition on April 16, 2011, and, according to their website, it was only supposed to be up until May 16, 2011. As of today, May 29, the exhibition remains as it began, existing solely as a video tour: real art within a “simulated” or virtual gallery space. A gallery that can be anywhere at any time via an embed code. (Like here!)FREE 4 ALL's continued presence online points to some of the unique contradictions raised by the role of digital culture in redefining the exhibition process. Barmecidal Projects is an entirely digital gallery, so what sort of consequences are there if FREE 4 ALL sticks around for another week or so? Why even bother closing the exhibition at all? The lights are always on, and there is no front door to lock outside of gallery hours.The exhibition is luxurious, thrilling, and uses the cube space to toy with gravity, physics, and resource limitations. Lee Ornerod's “Bulldog Clip #7” transforms the gallery floor into a supple flesh. Jarrod Wilson's “Baker's Dozen,” a spectacularly silky, coiling black turd on a beach blanket, points to the modern omnipotence of the black-and-shiny. Lauren Brick's glass coffin/greenhouse on plywood with floating ghost and Danielle Besada's plastic bag full of water and cinder block engage one of the most seductive aspects of art creation in cyberspace: unlimited access to flexible, translucent materials regardless of their chemical nature, regardless of their cost.Transparency itself becomes an issue as future virtual curators and gallerists figure out which elements of the art world will bolster the digital realm into a believable rigidity. FREE 4 ALL takes place in an online version of New York's Matthew Marks Gallery, and retains the characteristics of classical exhibition format. Video screens within the exhibition are Samsung flat-screens that appear to have been hung at a traditional height, in actual proportion. Flat, white fluorescence illuminates the exhibition (which opened in conjunction with Toronto ON’s Butcher Gallery, an actual space).Barmecidal Projects costs real money, somehow, regardless of the netwide illusion that the web is free and comes from nowhere. Its titular purpose is to put forth an illusory bounty; the legs of the table, the real stuff that must always exist to give life to the illusion, that hold up the hyperreal buffet are as IRL as it gets, regardless of how long the empty plates are spinning, gleaming, in mid-air.
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