Christophe Atabekian  (France)

Working in Paris, Atabekian came to this exhibition through the grapevine of artists working globally, and from that perspective is the epitome of this project in its ability to transpose boarders.

Alfredo Aquilizan (Philippines)

True to Aquilizan’s humour, he has chosen to present his own urban crop in a conversation with the original image. In his image there is a fabulous pun on the two directives “’give way’ and ‘no entry’. Given Aquilizan has just immigrated to Australia, one wonders if his choice is a deeper comment on migration and the Filipino diaspora, which his installations address.

Poklong Anading  (Philippines)

Anading often uses old video technology and plays with photographic processes. Here one is reminded of a negative, with its dark reversals of light and dark, the outline of the cityscape etched into the blackness of the picture plane.

Matthew Carver (Canada/UK)

Carver spends a lot of time working in Asia and earlier this year was in Malaysia. ‘Tanda’ is the bahasa Malaysian word for ‘sign’. Carver constructs an extremely subtle visual / verbal pun that comments on the ‘obviousness’ of seeing.

Lena Cobangbang  (Philippines)

This diptych by Cobangbang is an interesting dialogue about line and spatial fracturing as we move from a macro to a micro engagement – exactly what we do when we crop an image by reducing its scale and focussing our vision. This is taken one step further conceptually – with extreme focus, moving in on an area, it become pixelated beyond recognition and – out of focus. 

Mideo M. Cruz (Philippines)

“Anno domini” - Mideo is known for his performance / installation work which holds a strong social conscious and comments on institutional power and disparities such as the Church in the Philippines and Filipino oligarchy. You can see it here in his image. But Mideo also presents another interesting conversation with his manipulation, with his candy-colour skyscrapers – cathedrals of capitalism – set against a sky patterned with planes offering a more sinister global comment.

Luisito “Louie” Cordero (Philippines)

Cordero is part of a genre of artists working at the edges of indie culture, music, comic and animation. Recently visiting SLOT, Cordero has picked up on a kind of street energy that characterises peripheral CBD zones. 

Article on Cordero 3.5 Mb

Marina Dearnley (Australia)

Dearnely is known for your digital manipulations of urban graffiti and signage, which SLOT has presented over the past two years.  Here she typically uses the grid and repetition in a very considered ‘crop’.

Nami Dunham (California, USA)

Dunham strips the image to its most elementary structure. For her ‘cropping’ manifest as an erasure of unnecessary detail such as colour or form. We are left with an echo of the former image, like residue memory. Do we build our own cities of our imagination from the foundation she proposes … or does the city wash away to anonymity like its many inhabitants.

Merilyn Fairskye  (Australia)

Fairskye approached this as a ‘filmic’ exercise. She cropped the image to form a frame, and then reproduced the crop 25 times based on the frame-per-second video format. She then stacked the crops one over the other with decreasing opacity at one pixel apart. As she says “Just like my Stati seconds!"

Mai Long (Australia)

Mai’s paintings carry an optical intensity, moving between a surreal landscape of still lives and emotional portraits. Her image here plays with a similar weighty construct delivered with the sweet coating of popular culture: a barbie-esq angel hovers above a skull, and Bush and Howard become the signposts of ‘service’.

Hayati Mokhtar  (Malaysia)

“Digital songket” - A songket is the traditional gold embroided textile that is worn like a sarong as formal attire for a male. Just as a tartan speaks of Scottish identity and nationality, the songket is a deeply Malaysian expression. Hayati plays on the fractured, layering of identity with the digital pixelation of Malaysia’s skyline.

Constantine Nicholas (Australia)

“Untitled (AustraliaDay11am)” - Nicholas has overlaid this urban scape with the mark making, resins and scarring typical of his paintings. This idea of layering histories is central to Nicholas’ work. It is about ‘blotting out’ something that has gone before, or building upon those histories?

Nguyen, Minh Phuoc (Vietnam)

Founder of Hanoi’s Ryllega Gallery, Minh Phuoc’s manipulation plays on the heavy use of advertising signage, replacing the text with the gallery’s own promotional dissemination. One wonders whether the vacant image filling the windows of the ‘shop front’ is a comment on the vacuous nature / synthetic effect of advertising on the passer-by.

Nguyen, Huy Nhu  (Vietnam)

“The window” - Huy has cropped an element of the skyline and isolated it on a field of colour, picking up the geometry of the scaffold from the original image. In this sense, what he has ‘cropped out’ has become a field of colour, creating a keyhole to the original image. It is a slide between a modernist utopia and its post modern reconstruction.

Milenko Prvacki  (Singapore)

Prvacki is the only artist who followed the ‘instructions’ for this exercise exactly. He has cropped the original image, presenting a new vision of the same scene, altered by one’s own sense of ‘framing’.

Norberto Roldan (Philippines)

“(Pls don’t KL me wid ur luv!)”  - Roldan often uses text in his installations. Here he presents a fabulous pun on KL (Kuala Lumpur) with the text-messaging vernacular ubiquitous to Asian cities.

Suellen Symons (Australia)

Suellen has been photographing twins for years. This wonderful pairing of burley wrestlers with the macho gusto of skyscrapers and Asia’s penchant for development, is twinged with the idea of ‘sameness’ of cities globally.

Laurens Tan (Australia/China)

“Global Trance” - Having spent the past six months in Beijing, Tan tubular ‘plastic-scape’ presents a new world development, propagating at the speed of a viral worm – is it a computer game, a casino or reality?

Richard Tipping  (Australia)

Tipping has cropped from both the original images and used them to construct a new image. There is a feeling of melancholy and disconnection as the image invites us to suture – city, self and the open beyond. It is the place of dreams – an ethereal scape.

Tony Twigg (Australia)

Twigg has dissected the original image into 9 crops; rearranged the parts and then reassembled them in a visual zip that talks about constructing space and stacking perspective in a new dimensional dialogue that goes beyond location or place.

Megan Walch  (Australia)

Walch captures the kind of dizzying pace of a city’s development, warped and twisted beyond reality. She gives us a very individual view of the world, as seen through her paintings, dragged and morphed into a new visual space.

Cecilia White  (Australia / UK)

Cecilia has taken a single element – the heart of the image for her - stripped it of unnecessary information and presented it clean on a white page. It is as though all the noise of the landscape has been removed to allow this rather emotive female voice to be heard.

Su-Ann Wong  (Malaysia)

Trained as a graphic designer, Su-Ann has isolated the strong graphic elements of the image and constructed a visual horizon that speak of that place – she has cropped the identity of that street scape.

Yap Sau Bin (Malaysia)

Sau Bin has cropped and split the image in the spirit of a psychological Rorschach Drawing or patterning of a kaleidoscope, moving our viewing into a subconscious Plane and beyond the ‘reality’ or dis-reality of the original Malaysian landscape.