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, counterfeiting and reappropriation to address issues of cultural biography and economic power structures. Born in the Philippines in 1974, she received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has shown nationally and internationally: at PSI, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The New Museum, SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, The Contemporary Museum Honolulu, and was included in the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. Residencies include the The Atlantic Center for the Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts , KALA Art Center, Skowhegan, and the Center for Metamedia, Czech Republic. In 2007 she exhibited a global counterfeiting project at art spaces in Beijing, Manila, and Istanbul. She has had visiting faculty appointments at Stanford University and The California College of the Arts and currently lives and works in San Francisco.
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