Simon Scheuerle’s exhibition ‘Ooops Winter’ hits at the core of the social disfranchisement that inhabits the urban design project known as Canberra. Walter Burley Griffin’s design for Canberra has given Australia a national capital praised for its liveability and unique relationship to the natural environs. The suburbs and bush intertwine gracefully and allow the residents a lifestyle that is seemingly free of the urban degradation of some of our larger cities. However, the flip side of such a purpose-built city is flatness in the cultural and social landscape. There is little grit and no resistance to the banalities of a consumer driven society. Scheuerle recognises the complexities and contradictions that underscore the social capital of Canberra and he goes a long way in extrapolating the local to identify global issues central to us all.
A recent graduate from the School of Art, Australian National University, Scheuerle in a former life, lived for a couple of years on the streets with skateboard and backpack, gaining enough street cred and worldly experience to give his social observations a septic intensity. He takes on consumer culture, fast food, and horror film, and does so adroitly by underscoring urban design as what guides the citizens’ notion of social responsibility. In Ooops Winter Scheuerle sets up an ordered grid of sculptural works placed on green carpet tiles that, in their organisation, reference the urban planning design of Walter Burley Griffin. In a work titled Exploring Popular Culture a small figure dressed in a red raincoat kneels behind Minnie Mouse who has been forced head down, arse up. Closer inspection reveals that the dwarf figure in the red raincoat has its right hand up Minnie’s arse