Stephanie Syjuco in "San Francisco Bay Area" - Season 9 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

♪ ♪

I come from a pretty traditional

sculpture background in the sense that I
spent four years

in art school, literally just making things.

You know, to hand-make something mean

you're going to process it.

Like, it comes into your head,

and then it moves
through your body,

and then it gets pushed back

out into the world.

[sewing machine whirring]

I'm interested in how objects reflect
cultural moments.

And I think I'm trying to figure out, you know,
why we value what we value.

[electronic music]

So with the
"Counterfeit Crochet Project,"

I invited crochet crafters from all over the world

to join me in bootlegging
designer handbags.

The invitation was to choose a designer handbag that you would like to own,

but couldn't afford, download an image from
it online

and then using your own crochet crafting skills, hand-make it.

And interestingly, it touched a nerve, and, you know, lots of people started to join up,

and then send me photographs of
themselves with their handmade bags.

It was fun and lighthearted,
but invariably what would happen was,
you know,

we would have these really great
discussions about everything from the

hierarchy of the fashion system to you know,
global counterfeiting schemes.

I think one of the reasons I got
interested in this idea of like bootlegs

or counterfeits is actually, it's an
extension from this idea that there is

an authentic, and you know from a very
personal standpoint

I was really curious about what it meant to be an authentic, um, Filipino.

I was thinking a lot about historical

ethnographic photography

Specifically, um, images I'd
seen taken in the Philippines.

♪ ♪

So the whole series is made in Omaha
Nebraska, which I think is hilarious

And I had gone
to the shopping malls,

and using my credit card, purchased mass-consumer goods,

took them back to my studio,
and then styled them.

And then returned them all
to the department stores for full store credit.

So it was kind of this way of thinking about what we wanna consume in those images,

partaking in it, but then also denying it.

This is something that, um...

It's a portrait of
my mother and myself,

um, not long after we moved to,
the U.S. from the Philippines.

And then for my birthday, she decided to take me to Disneyland.

And so this photograph is actually,

I think, in the Frontierland, where you can pay to have your portrait

taken after you put on all these western
costumes.

I think, you know, at the time we were
trying on these fictional identities of

what it might have looked like to be a
new American.

Also, I mean,
it's an amazing portrait.

Like, my mom is 22 years old
here, and she looks beautiful,

and I'm this
angry little four year old.

[Laughs]

- [singing "El Breve Espacio
En Que No Estás"]

The title of my next exhibition is
called "Citizens"

I think there's always been embedded
politics in my work,

whether it's issues of colonialism or capitalism

but given recent politics I've been

really trying to figure out how to
actually put it more at the forefront.

- Ready to fight?

Crowd: Damn Right!

- Are you ready to fight?

Crowd: Damn Right!

The Bay Area has been a real flash point
for a lot of recent protests and so I

and so I feel like I've been
in the middle of it.

You know, you watch the news,
you watch images flashing by,

and you're kind of trying
to process it all.

- We need to figure out how wide
the actual banner is.

And I was noticing that this
one particular banner kept popping up.

And depending
on how it was held up,

or how it was being displayed you could or
in some cases could not read the text

- Cool.
- All right.

And so
I downloaded those images,

and then, you know,
traced it on the computer,

projected it onto a larger piece of fabric,

and then hand sewed it.

It says "Become Ungovernable,"
and it's kind of, you know,

I feel like the banner itself
is becoming ungovernable.

Like, it's got loose ends,
it's got, you know,

the text itself is kind of, like, falling off the page,
um so it's trying to kind of embody that

um, so it's kitrying
to kind of embody that,

that inability to be controlled.

One of the problems,
I think, with slogans

is that people think they already know what the slogan means,

and so you can either shut off to it,

or you can, you know, nod your head in agreement.

So when I was using
these images of protests,

I was more interested in
actually how they're filtered

through media channels.

[Sewing machine whirring]

In a lot of my projects,
I'm really interested in this connection between

the analog and the digital

So, I decided to create this huge hand sewn quilted checkerboard background

[mouse clicks]

And it resembles a Photoshop transparency background

When you cut out an image in Photoshop,

Photoshop will put in this like really weird you know, checkerboard pattern.

It's actually to point out this idea that,

you know, digital culture is not neutral

that simply because there's a computer

involved doesn't mean that there isn't
human labor

♪ ♪

Um, hmm.

Yeah, let me
go hand that to you.

Yeah, I think we could
try something like this.

I feel like I'm constantly
making things.

And I do feel like I have this
ratio that I've worked out

where I call it
the sort of 80/20 ratio,

where 80% of what I make
is kind of crap,

but somehow I have to produce
it to get to the 20%,

which is successful.

[laughs]
It's kind of like rubble,

but not really.
[chuckles]

- Did you all buy
the fabric this color?

- Yeah, so this is, um, chroma
key fabric, the green screen.

I've been gravitating to
working with chroma key

which is this awful, acid color.

I'm standing in front of a green chroma
key screen. Anything that you photograph

or shoot in front of this screen, you can
put in any type of backdrop,

you can create a fantasy scene.

[laughter]

[camera shutter snaps]

And so, thinking about both
politics and social strife

and everything that's kind of permeated
and saturated everything,

you know, now it's just this kind of

constant in our backgrounds.

You know, what does that mean
to then use chroma key as the literal subject

instead of ignoring it?

♪ ♪

- All right.
Wanna grab that one, Durham?

So, I became a U.S. citizen when I was 26 years old. Despite having lived here

since I was three , I had to kind of make
that decision,

and then go through the process of the citizenship test.

- All right, I am an..

I was thinking a lot about a 1942
photograph taken by Dorothea Lange.

and she had taken a photograph of an
Oakland store front

where a Japanese American had a business there,

and upon
the notification for Japanese internment

he had put up a sign in the window that just proclaimed "I am an American."

- Um, let's do the scrunching.

The idea that citizenship can
be given and also taken away

was something
that really interested me.

because I do feel like there's been a
lot of Reckoning with people having to

struggle with what it means to be an
American today.

Like, what do we stand for?

What can we become?

[cell phone snaps]

My current studio is located in a really industrial part of the Bay

It overlooks San Francisco, actually.

So, just looking out over the water, you can see it at a distance.

You know, I grew up in that city,

I relocated to Oakland four years ago,

because I couldn't afford to stay in San Francisco anymore.

You know, the Bay area
can be a really wonderful kind of fermenting space for

for artists.

Not because it's easy to live here,

'cause it's not easy to live here,

but there are ways that
artists can create community

and spaces for themselves here.

If we're to look at the complexity of our contemporary culture,

our political moment,

you know, our lived realities,

I want my work to be as

complicated as well.

That there isn't just one way to look at it, you know,

that depending on your perspective you'll see
it a different way

And I also want it to inhabit
contradictions.

- All right. Fierce

And so, you know,
looking at images of protests,

we created
these composite characters.

And so they're fictions.

Black-clad individuals
are usually associated with,

you know,
a kind of very direct action.

Is it a character
that one finds problematic,

or is it something that
might elicit even you know, some empathy?

There's a portrait of someone covered in a very sheer gray-and-white
checkerboard pattern.

The portrait is of
a person who is undocumented.

It's a difficult thing for me
to talk about, actually,

because given the state of our contemporary political situation,

you know, that person
could be taken at any minute.

Depending on how you read that image
it's about either the removal

or about their protection.

One really important
possibility for art

is that it is
a recording device, you know.

I mean, it's a subjective one,

but it's a device, that, somehow through an individual or a
group of individuals

processes a situation
in the world,

and then creates a
subjective viewpoint of that.

As evidence.

I do not think at all that my work, in
and of itself,

is actually going to change the system

What I'm interested in though, is somehow reflecting a possibility.

What I'm doing is kind of like
absorbing and processing
the world around me,

and it's becoming political.

I don't think I have a choice anymore.

It's just my reality.

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