YUPPIE
A solo presentation by Richie Culver
In YUPPIE, Culver examines the aesthetic and psychological debris of late capitalist aspiration, institutional presence, and technological friction. The exhibition adopts a restrained visual syntax-typographic severity, repetition, and lo-fi, grain-saturated imagery-positioning these elements within a critical reflection on the collapse of symbolic stability in contemporary life. The titular term, drawn from the cultural lexicon of the 1980s, is mobilised not as nostalgia but as critique: a marker of professional ambition and social mobility recontextualised through disillusionment, stagnation, and a flattened future horizon. The children's Christmas film The Snowman—a fragile allegory of wonder, impermanence, and loss circulating in the same decade-haunts this terrain as a counterpoint: a dreamlike innocence collapsing into inevitable disappearance.