Give and Take: The Free Market

The Free Market exhibition involved Carroll Harris collecting a myriad of food and other goods from local shops, cafes, record companies, nurseries, and supermarkets, that would otherwise be destined for landfill. The collected ‘trash’ was then curated into sculptural and immersive installations throughout the gallery’s white-walled interior.  Visitors were then encouraged to dismantle and take away from these as they needed, thus creating a two week-long, gradually depleting ‘free market’.

Opening night was unlike any other I have been to! The mass give-away provoked mixed reactions from an audience who had never before received more at a gallery opening than a glass of cheap wine and a bowl of shrivelled dried apricots.  Some would rush to claim as much as they could carry, and then slow down, consider what they had taken, and return one or two items, almost guiltily.

By removing price-tags, audiences were given clarity to consider the real value of the items up for grabs, and how greatly they needed them. Inherently stingey, I found myself overwhelmed by the onslaught of zero-dollar bargains. “But, do I really need another science fiction encyclopaedia?” I reluctantly asked myself.

Carroll Harris contacted homeless shelters in the local areas to try to extend audiences to include those in immediate need of the recycled goods, with mixed success. “Paddington is quite exemplary of Sydney and its harshness - it's gentrified, but there's still a lot of homelessness and drug abuse. In the end, I did end up reaching out to some people in need, but the project reinforced for me just how inaccessible and alienating the gallery space can be for non-arty types.”

So the ratio of hipsters to hobos was little uneven, but I do not necessarily believe that this means the Free Market was a failure. Unlike other openings, where conversation is often limited to polite small talk, discussions about what Carroll Harris was attempting to do could be heard erupting throughout the room.

“The success lay in the Free Market’s immersive nature- if you took something, or even if you didn’t, simply by being there you were immediately involved in the project, and entitled to have an opinion about it.” 

Carroll Harris is still receiving offers of contribution to The Free Market, despite it having closed a month ago. The positive response is an indicator of how experimental art projects can nudge towards broadening perspectives. “I think that projects like this can spell out the alternatives to the way things are currently done, get people thinking outside the box” says Carroll Harris. “Artists can imagine different futures and make these ideas visible to audiences. That's really exciting”.

Photographer: Jimmy Le