BIO
STEPHANIE SYJUCO'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 projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, creating frictions between high ideals and everyday materials. This has included starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods; presenting a parasitic art counterfeiting event, "COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone" for Frieze Projects, London (2009); and “Shadowshop,” an alternative vending outlet embedded at SFMOMA exploring the ways in which artists are navigating the production, consumption, and dissemination of their work (2010).
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 MOMA/P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, The Contemporary Museum Honolulu, The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, among others. In 2007 she led counterfeiting workshops in Istanbul and in 2009 contributed proxy sculptures for MOMA/P.S.1's joint exhibition, "1969." She has taught at Stanford University, The California College of the Arts, UC Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon University. A recipient of a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, she lives and works in San Francisco.
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).
- Read thesis submitted to Stanford University,
2005
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