12.10.11 Recent media viewing: Helvetica, Allan McCollum, Paul Chan
A grand re-watching is in place: I just realized I have re-seen or re-heard three media pieces that I’ve seen before. Only now it seems like brand new.
“Helvetica” documentary
Allan McCollum video segment on PBS’s Art21 documentary series
Paul Chan’s talk “The Spirit of Recession” at the New School, New York, April 2008. (I actually saw this one in person so it’s nice to re-hear it via podcast).
12.10.11 Printeresting visit to Electric Works
My friend and fellow artist Anthony Ryan took RL Tillman of Printeresting on an SF visit of printmaking spots. On the way they stopped by Electric Works and took a gander at an edition, “Future Shock Nesting Boxes” that I worked on with them way back in 2005 (!)… It’s inspiring me to come up with another print piece. Printmaking (or the creation of multiples and paper-based works) are so wonderfully satisfying to make and I’m longing to make things more distributable…
Link to Printeresting article here.
Image courtesy of printeresting.org
2012 sneak preview!
I can’t believe 2012 is already starting to fill up with projects and timelines. It’s great but an interesting predicament that you have to start planning so far in advance and can’t really just do things “quick and dirty” anymore. Well, obviously, you CAN — you just have to make more time for it. Anyhow, here’s an in-progress shot of something that may be happening in May 2012. Not really going to give it much info right now except that it involves the mass production of lots of things (printed matter, ceramics, textiles, etc) all the same deep orange color. Ha!
Artforum review by Gwen Allen, October issue
My solo show “RAIDERS” at Catharine Clark Gallery was reviewed in the October print edition of Artforum. Thanks Gwen Allen, for such a thoughtful and insightful commentary on the work!
Review: RAIDERS exhibition in Zyzzyva.org
A neat little review of my current exhibition, “RAIDERS” that opened at Catharine Clark Gallery last Saturday just came out in the online portion of Zyzzyva. Written by Alexander Bigman, it’s a nice run-down of the different components of the show and a great summary of the ideas I was playing with…
Images from upcoming “RAIDERS” exhibition
In-progress shots of new work being produced for my first solo exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery, SF. I’m setting up a large-scale installation in the front room, showing several poster/flyers in the hall area, and then a book/video/object installation for the back room. Related by issues of mediation and cultural “raiding,” the works are, for me, a wonderful way to step away from the recent “relational” works I’ve been doing and a chance to author new directions for my interests…
Summer exhibitions: official updates!
Just sent out an official update to exhibitions and events happening for me over the summer… here’s the link to see it all, in super-summarized form! And if you’d like, a PDF of the announcement. It includes the upcoming show at Catharine Clark Gallery (SF) and the Columbus Museum Ohio.
work in progress from the series “RAIDERS: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest (Selections from the A_____ A__ M_____)” for solo exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco. Opening June 4, 2011. Digital images of Asian antiquities downloaded from the internet, printed as Epson archival photos and mounted onto lasercut plywood.
Press release: RAIDERS at Catharine Clark Gallery, opens June 4, 2011
For my upcoming solo exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery, SF
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA February 3, 2011
Solo Exhibition: Stephanie Syjuco: RAIDERS
Media Room: Kate Gilmore: three video works
June 4–July 16, 2011
Reception Saturday, June 4, 4–6pm
Catharine Clark Gallery, 150 Minna Street, San Francisco, CA 94105
Press Contact…. Rhiannon E. MacFadyen, rem@cclarkgallery.com
(415) 399-1439, www.cclarkgallery.com
San Francisco, CA:
Catharine Clark Gallery announces RAIDERS, a solo exhibition of installations by Stephanie Syjuco. Three videos by Kate Gilmore are presented in the Media Room. The exhibition dates are June 4 through July 16, 2011. Syjuco will be present at the opening reception on Saturday, June 4, from 4 to 6pm.
Stephanie Syjuco has raided the collection of a prominent Asian arts and antiquities museum…figuratively, that is. For RAIDERS, her first solo exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery, Syjuco has amassed a re-assembled collection of antique vessels by downloading publicly available images from their online database and printing them at the actual sizes listed on the site. Adhered to laser-cut wooden backings and gathered in groups, the prop- like objects at first glance appear to be a collection of valued cultural objects. Upon closer inspection, the vessels, now degraded and flattened, have been rendered ineffective, removed from their original usage, and then again from their institutional context. By using open online sources, Syjuco investigates how we participate in the construction of culture and how the accessibility of the internet can facilitate its redistribution. On a more personal level, Syjuco has chosen Asian vessels as a way of exploring her own heritage and how it may or may not be found in these representations. “For me there is a murkiness of where my identifications lie, since I am supposed to have a connection to the original objects’ histories.” Already rife with cultural and historic meaning, the vessels, jars, bowls, and vases—curvaceous items meant to contain things—also represent femininity and maternity, signifying gender roles, as well as ethnic ones. The works in RAIDERS delve into issues of acquisition, appropriation, and the accumulation of cultural capital through international “booty.” The title of the exhibition—a play both on the idea of piracy and a nod to the antiques-rescuing archeologist Indiana Jones—raises a question: who is the raider: the artist or the institution?
A hybrid of digital and analogue bootlegging, Syjuco’s “thievery” has played an important role in her process. In October 2009 she presented a parasitic art-counterfeiting event, COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone, for Frieze Projects, London, as well as contributed proxy sculptures for PS1/MoMA’s joint exhibition “1969.” For her project Everything Must Go (Grey Market), she created a double-layer of stolen goods by re-creating electronics using images of potentially stolen items from online vendor sites such as Ebay and craigslist. Other recent works have used the tactics of bootlegging, re-appropriation, and fictional fabrications to address issues of cultural biography, labor, and economic globalization. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, creating frictions between high ideals and everyday materials.
Born in the Philippines, Stephanie Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, and included in exhibitions at PS1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The New Museum, SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Contemporary Museum (Honolulu), The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, among others. She has led workshops for her ongoing global collaborative Counterfeit Crochet Project at art spaces in Istanbul, Beijing, and Manila, and in December 2008 her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Her works have been praised in Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, Art Practical, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Wallstreet Journal, Craft Magazine, and on KQED’s Spark, among many others. For the last six months, Syjuco’s project Shawoshop was embedded within the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s fifth floor galleries—a project that included the works of 200 Bay Area artists and garnered significant critical acclaim, raising $100,000 for the artists who participated in the work.
About Catharine Clark Gallery
Established in 1991, Catharine Clark Gallery presents the work of contemporary artists. A wide range of media is represented in the gallery’s program with an emphasis on content-driven work that challenges both the traditional use of materials and formal aesthetics. Catharine Clark Gallery was the first San Francisco gallery to create a dedicated media room, presenting new genres and experimental video art with each changing exhibition. Exhibitions are hosted on a six-week schedule and generally feature one or two solo exhibitions in addition to media room installations. The gallery regularly participates in national and international art fairs.
Housed in a former 1920s farming equipment warehouse, redesigned by Los Angeles-based architectural designer Tim Campbell, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, is situated among numerous arts-related landmark buildings in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Neighborhood; it is adjacent to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD), and near the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, and is housed on the ground floor of the same historical building as SF Camerawork. The gallery is open Tuesday–Saturday, 11am–6pm. For more information, please visit www.cclarkgallery.com or email info@cclarkgallery.com.
Featurette on Culturehall: “What Am I Being Sold?”
A curated selection of work with essay by Oliver Wise and Eleanor Hanson, featuring the Center for Tactical Magic, Lea Redmond, Stephanie Syjuco, and Amy Balkin.
“For as long as artists have come into contact with the market, they have created work that reflects or responds to it. We’ve chosen four artists who avoid explicit commentary on the market, but who instead utilize its structures as their medium. By placing a financial transaction at its core, their work exposes, complicates, and subverts its capitalist context. Though the approaches and goals vary, contained within each of these transactions (or in their absences) is a challenge as well as a proposal, whether it be for a more civically engaged, materialistically connected, or collectively shared world…”
