HOLES Perspective @ Atelier Art Space

Coinciding with the launch of a pothole-reporting mobile application by the Petaling Jaya city council, this exhibition plays upon the common gripe of Malaysian road users, and applies a sometimes-effective metaphor to urban and national concerns. Photographs take the form of post-internet images, although its crude manipulation denote an amateurish execution. In ‘New Technique?’, a giant plaster is crafted to emphasize the analogy, the exaggerated object posing a visually potent motif that can be used for anything from graffiti to statement posters to advertising. The state of the nation is represented as a punctured race track, while more immediate concerns like golf diplomacy and water shortages, are doctored into photographs.

New Technique? (2015)

Reference to local colloquialisms are pretentious with the exception being ‘Grandfather’s road’, its chalk drawing imbuing a comic element to a favourite rant, frequently blurted on the relatively less holey Jalan Tun Razak. ‘Fair race?’ depicts the advantage of being a snail over a racing car, the picture more useful to the viewer who exercises humility in reading the political inference. Showcasing a map where the potholes were found, You Sef could do well to report these existing evidence via the CleanMyCity app. Maintaining a structurally flawed infrastructure is unsustainable, which leads to the question, do we need such infrastructure in the first place?

Grandfather's road (2015)