@AmericanAir: “Oh no, Hamishi! What’s going on?” @sprintcare: “Failure is not an option! What is going on? How can we help? Let us know. Thanks *AET” @LordoftheFries1: “What’s up?”. A flood of expressions of regret, a new corporate colloquialism for the social media age. Five 400cm-long t-shirts digitally-printed with retweets from Hamishi Farah‘s Twitter account, retweets of responses to an abstract message of general disgruntlement, responses that typify 21st century customer service. Farah’s Apologies shirts get right to the point of where the Melbourne artist’s work is at: an obsession with the online entity.
Apologies accompanies video work, a series of paintings and 500 socks (honestly) in albeit tho – a blackartprojects-presented solo show for the young artist, occupying a disquieting space at the arse-end of Flinders Street until 6 April. The socks? By all accounts, Farah wore a new pair each day during the process of putting together this collection. A tad frivolous for a young artist, I dare say. That’s that, onto the important stuff – eight paintings, lolling in the realm of the LOL. Hamishi is a deft painter, and his internet-affixed musings on image saturation flirt with graphic art in painterly form. Google Chrome sofas, Skype armchairs, Homer Simpson, Photoshop canvases and, perhaps most fascinatingly, painted brush strokes. Farah brings the physical to the ephemeral, the ephemeral to the physical. In a world where our zeros and ones are increasingly intertwined with our tangible selves, Hamishi Farah’s avant garde fantasies are probably more rooted in Realism than one may first thing.
The view (2014)
acrylic on board
124 x 84 cm
BLAH
I am the most regular guy (2014)
acrylic on board
124 x 84 cm
Trying to connect (2014)
acrylic on board
124 x 84 cm
I want to be so physically large it would be
impossible for me not to be Prime Minister (2014)
acrylic on board
124 x 84 cm
Two similar colours (2014)
acrylic on board
124 x 84 cm
