Future Exhibitions

Canberra: low life

For many Australians, Canberra is a simply modern myth. A city of surfaces, designed within an inch of life, it is sometimes difficult to imagine that anything real actually happens behind the façade that presents an image of order to the outside world. Canberra: low life focuses on the work of four ACT based photomedia artists who have pierced the veneer of civilization to reveal a view that in any other centre would be ordinary. Simon Scheuerle, Samantha Small, Erica Hurrell and TJ Phillipson are “wanderers”, lone explorers with cameras for whom the empty streets and suburbs of planet Canberra provide fleeting evidence of life … not all of it attractive.

On the exclusive Empire Circuit Samantha Samantha Small entered a burnt out house through a side window. Mrs Allen the previous resident, had died in the fire and Small discovered her ghostly presence everywhere; recorded in ashen after images of handprints and possessions, imprinted by a smoke screen that ultimately reveals an atmosphere of transience and tragedy.

Similarly, people do not exactly inhabit Simon Schuerle’s work. Only the traces of humanity are present in a document of aftermaths that refer to events that have happened in another time. A fresh spit bubble, a washed up pink sofa in a storm water drain, provocative graffiti and a fire-gutted vehicle mysteriously parked on a suburban street, draw attention to those things that happen outside the present lines of sight and suggest unknown fascinating histories.

Erica Hurrell seems to photograph her every move. Opening the doors on suburban Canberra she cuts through artifice and challenges cosy impressions of family life with images that are raw – and real. Beyond the Brutalism and boredom of administration centres, shopping malls and circular roads lies a simple culture of “hanging out” at people’s places, of making your own fun. For Hurrell this is where the action is.

TJ Phillipson also makes his own fun in 101 ways to make contemporary art and his outrageous antics conceal the presence of a strong silent type. Again the loner, Phillipson’s video pokes fun at his personal struggle with creativity and innovation, produced in a privileged urban desert. Defying notions of art as a sensible civilized activity Phillipson highlights both the bathetic banal and the bizarre with facile intensity. Like all of these artists Phillipson suggests that what can’t happen here, does happen here.