ARTIST
STATEMENT
My
recent projects use objects and surfaces that look strangely familiar,
manipulating conventions of style and structure to create “mixed-use”
items. I have focused my work on issues of “illicit capitalism”—bootlegs,
knock-offs, and the reworked commodity—in an attempt to
address being an ambivalent subject of forces larger than myself—politics,
global economics, capitalism, and the corporate culture machine—all
the while maintaining that there is a way to mutate a given set
of laws, icons, or imagery, and place them at a new and different
service.
Using mostly cheap materials like foamboard, contact paper, tape,
scrap wood, and laserjet prints—I have made images and objects
that reference architectural or scientific diagrams, electronic
equipment, cityscapes, mass-produced goods, and contemporary artworks.
What interests me are the mis-translations or mis-appropriations
(be they purposeful or accidental) that happen when an image or
concept is remade and shifted away from their correct territories,
and especially when traveling from the “top” (i.e.
the global) on “downwards” (localized communities).
In these works issues of seriality and mass production also come
into play. While my own versions of these items are individually
made, they also hint at the possibility of serial production.
The idea of the artist as a "factory" has been with
us since the days of Warhol and Judd. Today, the factory as a
means of production in the era of late-capitalism and transnational
globalization, where almost all consumer goods are fabricated
overseas by anonymous laborers, raises for me the issue of what
it now means to individually hand-make that which was previously
made by a factory or machine. Does this constitute a political
act in itself? How does that change the "product" involved
when labor is NOT alienated from its production?
- Read
thesis submitted to Stanford University,
2005
BIO
STEPHANIE SYJUCO is a visual artist who’s recent work uses the tactics of bootlegging, reappropriation, and fictional fabrications to address issues of cultural biography, labor, and economic globalization. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her objects mistranslate and misappropriate iconic symbols, creating frictions between high ideals and everyday materials. This has included re-creating several 1950s Modernist furniture pieces by French designer Charlotte Perriand but using cast-off material and rubbish in Beijing, China; starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods; photographing models of Stonehenge made from cheap Asian imported food products; and searching for fragments of the Berlin Wall in her immediate surroundings in an attempt to revisit the historical moment of “the end of History.”
Born in the Philippines, she received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, and included in exhibitions at PS1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The New Museum, SFMOMA, The Contemporary Museum Honolulu, The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, among others. In 2007 she led counterfeiting workshops at artspaces in Istanbul, Beijing, and Manila, and in December 2008 will have a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston that will explore the legacy of Modernism and the Third World. She has taught at Stanford University, The California College of the Arts, and is currently a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University. She lives and works in San Francisco.
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