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Portrait
Series II,
1997, chalkboard paint, frames, overall 144" wide.
(Top)
Pacific Theater of Operations: Reconquest of the Philippines,
1996, cross-stitch panel, 10" x 13."
(Bottom) Pacific Theater of Operations: Bataan and
Corregidor, 1996, cross-stitch panel, 12" x 12."
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Selections
from
At Home & Abroad: Twenty Contemporary Filipino Artists
1988
At
the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Exhibition travelled to
the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, and the Metropolitan Museum,
Manila, Philippines.
CATALOG
ESSAY
From the exhibition "At Home and Abroad:
Twenty Contemporary Filipino Artists," 1998, written by Patrick
Flores, published by the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco.
In
rethinking the concept of the natural, Stephanie Syjuco draws
upon the seemingly natural practice of reckoning with memory and
blood relations. To the degree that ties and history are lived
out in and by bodies, they seem to be worked out as a personal
engagement of will. However, the artist dispels this illusion,
not by bringing us back to the nature/nurture antimony, but by
taking us to the brave new world of mutation, cloning, gene replication,
DNA testing, and hybridization. Her art is in effect a reconstruction
of the idea of the natural. For example, her ink-on-paper works
of weeds, in which the images morph into Rorschach tests of psychiatric
well-being, can be seen as biological investigations. A number
of crocheted pieces mimic the growth of tree rings, demonstrating
the affinity of natural forms and their aesthetic embodiment.
While art transforms nature, the will to form, or the technology
of making, need not be too human or too natural. The artist suggests
that the viewer be open to "those excluded from the original
science-authority arena." Syjuco deals with materials normally
considered banal or domestic like bread, lace, artificial flowers,
felt, doilies, and velvet, transforming them into snowflakes,
rifles, chromosomes, rocks, blood, and houses. This transformation
comes in the form of mimicry and reinvention, playing with the
illusion of appearance and resemblance in the context of an identity
that cannot calim to be pure or to exist in a state of raw data.
Syjuco offers this challenge:
"I am interested in blurring the distinctions made between
the organic and inorganic, the natural and the artificial. We
embrace fanciful ideas of a techno-future replete with gleaming,
man-made machines while at the same time creating a nostalgia
for the "natural world," encasing it in a special place
of worship, distinct and pure. Very seldom do we feel comfortable
and willing in letting the two paths cross. My work uses man-made
materials that mimic natural forms and behave as if they were
the "real thing," growing beyond their inorganic boundaries
and confusing themselves with what they were merely representing."
In bringing this to concrete form, Syjuco reconceives portraits
and diagrams of direction, and explores the slippage between representation
and emotional response. In Pacific Theater of Operations
(cat. nos. 19b-19c), she rigorously exposes how our knowledge
of history can be abstracted by, in her words, "decorative
stitchery." In describing these works she states, "Suddenly,
only a limited palette-specific actions, events, and contestations-represent
a particular place and how we choose to view it. Individual and
collective histories become reduced to dotted lines and arrows
marking movements, most noticeably in the depiction of how territories
shift and churn on a battlefield."
In Portrait Series II (cat. no. 19a), the enclosing
function of frames is suspended as ovoid fragments coalesce, splinter,
and shift like tectonic plates. The green circles of chalkboard
paint seem to be cells of identity, reproducing and generating
new matter, spreading like spores, and creating a contagion of
relations.
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