WEBVTT

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[Stephanie Syjuco: Making Time]

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I'm thankful that
I have a house that

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has a really beautiful
gardening area.

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I've been doing a lot of gardening,

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but it actually stemmed from some research
that I was doing on empire crops.

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Growing samples of tobacco,

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and corn, and cotton, and indigo--

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all sorts of different plants that actually
had a lot of implications with colonialism.

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The garden actually has become
a way to learn more,

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as a research process for my studio,

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but also to just center a little bit more.

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When most people get interested in being an artist,

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they have this idea that
you're just in your studio all the time.

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I think the irony is that
the more invested you get into it as a career,

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the ratios of time spent managing the projects

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versus actual studio time,

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radically shift.

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I mean, maybe there's this magical moment
where it changes

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and I have full-time assistants helping me,

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but my reality, I think, is...

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it's a lot more paperwork
than I wish it were.

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So, these are the pattern pieces,
for the American prairie dress.

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They make it as easy as possible for you.

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So, you literally cut out the pattern pieces,

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you pin it to the fabric,

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and then sew where it indicates.

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So it has the bonnet,

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an apron,

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the, kind of, Peter Pan collar,

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and then these puffed sleeves.

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There's also going to be
a Civil War antebellum dress.

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It's part of an exhibition at
the Smithsonian Museum

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for the Renwick Invitational.

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The Renwick is in the American galleries,

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which I'm really excited about.

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We're adding this work along with
other projects that relate to fabrication--

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of images, and textiles, and culture--

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but looking at it through a lens of critique.

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["The Visible Invisible" (2018)]

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The costumes may not be historically accurate
at all.

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They're really tapping into the American imagination.

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It has all the markers of that
time period in American history,

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but it's more of a fiction.

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They're in this chroma key green
that people use for video

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and photographic backdrops.

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It's a color that you're not supposed to see.

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This idea of American history is
so embedded in our national psyche

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that it's almost invisible.

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Whether it's tropes of, say, womanhood,

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or even of Western expansion,

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or Puritan religiosity--

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all that is in these costumes.

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It's like manifesting ghosts,

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hauling forward all this American history.

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I'm allowed to come up with
the strangest ideas,

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and not everybody says yes.

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But when they do say yes,

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I can make this thing happen
that is almost, to me, unbelievable.

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Nothing is really a waste of time.