Stephanie Syjuco: Making Time | Art21 "Extended Play"

[Stephanie Syjuco: Making Time]

I'm thankful that
I have a house that

has a really beautiful
gardening area.

I've been doing a lot of gardening,

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

Growing samples of tobacco,

and corn, and cotton, and indigo--

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

The garden actually has become
a way to learn more,

as a research process for my studio,

but also to just center a little bit more.

When most people get interested in being an artist,

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

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

the ratios of time spent managing the projects

versus actual studio time,

radically shift.

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

and I have full-time assistants helping me,

but my reality, I think, is...

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

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

They make it as easy as possible for you.

So, you literally cut out the pattern pieces,

you pin it to the fabric,

and then sew where it indicates.

So it has the bonnet,

an apron,

the, kind of, Peter Pan collar,

and then these puffed sleeves.

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

It's part of an exhibition at
the Smithsonian Museum

for the Renwick Invitational.

The Renwick is in the American galleries,

which I'm really excited about.

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

of images, and textiles, and culture--

but looking at it through a lens of critique.

["The Visible Invisible" (2018)]

The costumes may not be historically accurate
at all.

They're really tapping into the American imagination.

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

but it's more of a fiction.

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

and photographic backdrops.

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

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

that it's almost invisible.

Whether it's tropes of, say, womanhood,

or even of Western expansion,

or Puritan religiosity--

all that is in these costumes.

It's like manifesting ghosts,

hauling forward all this American history.

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

and not everybody says yes.

But when they do say yes,

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

Nothing is really a waste of time.