The Autonomous Manufacturing Zone

The lovely director of SF Camerawork, Chuck Mobley, just alerted me to the fact that the spring isssue of their journal, Camerawork, has just been published. My work “Personal Protest (Catalyst for Change)” is featured on the cover and it looks great! I had a great photoshoot for the image with their intern, Job Piston and it was an honor to be considered for the magazine. Huzzah!

Eat more vegetables! Stop picking on your boyfriend! Read more theory! More art, less talk!

From a new series of drawings/collages on duralene (a clearish, almost vellum-like paper) called “strange attractors.” I trace objects in catalogs and magazines, overlap them on the duralene, and then outline it in black to create an aggregate “blob.” The blobs are then juxtaposed with cutouts of modernist or Empire-style furniture. Still working out the ideas behind this series but I like the oddness of it…

Sometimes all those years spent as a graphics and exhibitions designer at a museum (10 years! The Exploratorium!) can pay off in that when it comes to setting up and designing things–websites, print materials, exhibition spaces–I can pull from a general roster of tried-and-true ideas.

Yesterday I designed and set up the website for The Counterfeit Crochet Project (http://www.counterfeitcrochet.org, natch!) and made it live in a few hours. It’s still missing some large swaths of a photo archive and other info, but it works and I’m happy with how it turned out. It’s got a gridpaper background (to suggest one’s plotting of counterfeit patterns) and a basic dark red, grey, black, and brown color scheme that reminds me of the Bauhaus basics. Or at least Russian Constructivism. Whatever.

I had registered the URL ages ago but only now set it up since when the show opens it’ll hopefully drive traffic to it’s own site. And in the past it was always piggybacked onto my main site (http://www.stephaniesyjuco.com) but it really deserves its own space.

I’ve been spending day after day on my laptop in the kitchen, feeling oddly like a giant deja-vu from my designer days. Designing flyers, space installation layouts, signage, catalog spreads, postcards, websites, etc. It’s weird that all this is needed for a project on crochet (the most analog and crafty of mediums). If I didn’t do this myself I’d have to hire a designer, ironically, so in the end it’s best to be in control of everything. And wouldn’t you know I’m a control freak when it comes to design. But darn if I can’t wait to get some real analog drawing and artmaking time into the near future!

From an email sent out earlier today:

Hello friends and colleagues!
I’m writing to invite you to participate in a Counterfeit Crochet opening night event at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on the evening of Friday, March 28! As part of the exhibition “The Way That We Rhyme,” the Counterfeit Crochet Project will have an installation and workshop area that will be active during the opening and duration of the show, and I’m seeking folks to participate in something akin to a “crochet army” of collaborators. See details below, the project statement, plus a plethora of your questions answered… Hope to hear from you

——————————
INVITATION DETAILS
——————————
WHAT: Invitation to be a part of the activated Global Counterfeiting Ring
WHEN: Friday, March 28, 2008, 8-11pm (opening night of the exhibition)
WHERE: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 3rd and Mission Streets, San Francisco, first floor galleries
AS PART OF: the exhibition “The Way That We Rhyme” curated by Berin Golonu
CONTACT: Stephanie Syjuco, studio@stephaniesyjuco.com

exhibition website: http://www.ybca.org/tickets/production.aspx?performanceNumber=4024
counterfeit crochet website: http://www.counterfeitcrochet.org
artist website: http://www.stephaniesyjuco.com

(more…)

The instructions have been published in CRAFT magazine a year or two ago, but I decided to make a downloadable PDF file on “How to Bootleg a Chanel Purse” complete with logo and basic instructions. It’s the first part of designing a flyer/handout for the Counterfeit Crochet show coming up, and helps me distribute the information for free. Copy it! Share it! Spread it!

It’s linked from the temporary website design that I just set up for www.counterfeitcrochet.org, and is 2-pages, less than 520k and fits on letter-size printer for ease of printing (hooray for thoughtful design!). Stay tuned for more how-to’s and a better, more improved counterfeiting website!

Last week I got back two sample books I had made for my project “All of Me” in which I attempt to collect and publish every single image of myself I can find in a given year (scroll down to see a prior entry, “Narcissism & horror” with better description). Using blurb.com I got back a softcover version of volume 1 (400 pages!), and a hardcover version of volume 4 (only about 80 pages).

I’m definitely going with the hardcover version. It just seems more “solid” and “real” somehow. I’m not super happy with the printing quality — the blacks print out great but the actual image quality definitely looks digitized and not half-toned. I know I wasn’t supposed to expect real photo-quality, but I was still hoping…

Anyhow, I’m still pretty satisfied, so it will move forward. I’ll print all four volumes of 2007 and at least have these before moving on to prior years…

As I’m pulling together The Counterfeit Crochet installation for the Yerba Buena show (opens in less than three weeks –yow! gotta line up all my ducks in a row, for sure!), it’s really hitting me how much I’ve bifurcated my artistic practice between materiality and concept in the past few years, and that I’m itching to get back into the studio to just mess with materials again. I identify as being a “sculptor” through and through, even when I’m working in video, drawing, photography, or what-have-you. It’s because in the end, to me, the work exists as a literal object that has a materiality that is considered to the process and concept, and it still falls in the realm of sculpture in my head.

Sculpture encompasses everything to me, but I heavily associate it with rummaging around in my studio or in a woodshop of some sort (San Francisco Art Institute, circa 1991-95. Ah, sweet memories!), spending hours sitting at a work table considering how a material looks next to another, tinkering, cutting, sanding, smoothing, or pushing together….things. Objects. STUFF.

studio view from 2007

So with the past few years seeing new projects that are more of an “execution” style–and by that, I DON’T mean “killing,” but the “oh, here’s-the-idea-and-now-i-have-to-execute-some-type-of-conceptual-move-to-see-it-through”–I’m realizing that I miss out on the process of tinkering and making that I had more time for in the past. The part where I’m just messing around, putting things together and dealing with aesthetics and material pleasure. I misssssss it so much. I’m also predicting that after the YBCA show is up and I have to start working on a future show for Jim Harris Gallery in June, I’m going to go back to some of the formal sculptural work I was making a few years ago and revisit some of the things I never fully formed way back when.

making “stuff” in Beijing, April 2007

In some way I was trying to meld a dialogue on material criticality with conceptual criticality in my “Material Worlds” graduate seminar class that I taught at CCA in Spring ‘07. I’m not sure if it worked on the students as well as I thought it could, but I think it’s also a challenging dialogue: how to talk about the joys, pleasures and pitfalls of a studio process and making that doesn’t sound hippie or hokey, and is actually a measured and considered discussion. That there is actually “meaning in the hands” that you can’t conceptualize over and need to physically go through. It was hard to find texts for the readings that didn’t come across as flighty or vague.

Here’s to sculpture in it’s studio form — the part that’s messy, inarticulate, and has nothing to do with pre-ordained high concept. The part that’s about hands and forms and running your fingers over a material that you’re curious about and wondering how it can be a physical metaphor for an idea or philosophy.

Below are a few artists that I’ve been looking at that trigger a visceral and pleasure response in my “sculpture brain”.

Anna Sew Hoy, hook & eye

Anna Sew Hoy, “Meteor”

Rachel Harrison, Huffy Howler, 2004

Rachel Harrison. What Would It be Like to Be Imelda Marcos? 1996-1997. Chromogenic color print in Styrofoam, papier-mâché, and acrylic, 44 x 21 x 22″ (118.8 x 53.4 x 55.9 cm)

Isa Genzken, Empire/Vampire III, 3, 2004. Various materials, 180 x 70 x 45 cm.

Isa Genzken, Mutter Mit Kind, plastic, fabric, mirror foil, wood, metal, lacquer, 194 x 60 x 100 cm

Isa Genzken

Carol Bove

I currently have several works in a group show at my Seattle gallery, and it’s already gotten several good writeups — wish I could have gone out to see it in person! Sometimes when an artwork, especially if it’s sculptural or installation-based gets installed without me, I have to send out photoshopped mock-ups of how to configure the work to a certain space. Below is the mockup of “Grey Market (Everything Must Go)” reconfigured for the Harris Gallery show.

And this was it’s original manifestation, back in 2006 at the San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art:

It’s interesting to see how things shift depending on install issues. Also included is a 2003 work, “Pacific Super (Stonehenge)”.

James Harris Gallery is pleased to announce a group exhibition titled “Message in a Bottle.” In bringing together a wide range of mediums – including sculpture, photography, painting and installation – the show focuses on how artists transform the expected visual utility of an object to multiple pictorial possibilities. These are artists who inherently investigate the origins of their subjects, creating fictive spaces and new relationships by placing disparate or unusual objects together in dynamic ways.

Helga Steppan, for instance, works by setting up clearly defined parameters and then documenting the process and results. In her series ‘See Through,’ Steppan divided all of her belongings into the full spectrum of different color groupings. These groupings were then arranged according to classical compositional values and photographed. The images that result are magnetic monochrome photographs that both reflect the artist’s persona and deny our understanding of it.

Similarly Francisco Guerrero culls from the unlimited piles of imagery in popular culture. Using it only as source material, Guerrero then washes over these images with a seductive, masterly hand. At the same time, he emphasizes the anonymity of his subjects. Through the tension between a highly painterly and personal style and the exceedingly editorialized airbrushed content, Guerrero calls into question the way we, almost literally, consume images as reality.

Andrew Witkin collects, creates, and organizes a variety of elements to present multiple connections between the aural, visual and textual parts. In Sculpture #2, a table-top installation, the artist has placed records, books, newspaper article, photographs around empty wine bottles and wine glasses on a long table. The placement of each object is key to transforming the context of its origin into an open ended narrative that tells a story about the way the artist navigates the world.

Stephanie Syjuco takes objects that look strangely familiar and manipulates them to new ends, so as to mutate icons and imagery towards a different service. For example the photograph titled Pacific Super addresses issues of global production, consumption and cross-cultural translation, using the familiar image of a world-famous “mystical” European landmark “Stonehenge” and everyday Asian goods.

Eric Elliott uses subtle variations of grey oil paint to show the viewer that all things are interconnected, that everything is part of a larger whole. His non-tradition still life paintings hover between abstraction and realism. The heavy impasto surface created by his brush work reveals objects while pushing them into pictorial abstraction.

In contrast to Elliott’s dense applications of paint Joseph Park’s compositions are impeccably mannered. Without blending a single color directly on the canvas, Park’s cool realism is able to evoke multiple references. From anime to pre-Raphaelite painting and cubist sensibilities, Park explores and implodes the history of vanitas. He infuses traditional techniques with an almost unprecedented cinematic and pictorial realism so that while the compositions appear to be simple and echo snapshots they are complex narratives of the private moments.

Though Roy McMakin’s sculptures resemble useful/functional objects, he pushes them past their own utility. In the exhibition, for instance, the 2-dimensonal picture plane of a painting breaks into a sculptural object. This layful give and take acts a vehicle for the artist to investigate formal concepts while distancing them from functionalism. McMakin disrupts our notion of the domestic realm by referencing a vernacular decorative motif commonly found in mass produced cabinetry, defining and challenging the relationship between art-making a design.

Through freedom of reference and quotation, as well as a rejection of conventional hierarchies among sources, Adam Pendleton similarly aims to upset comfortably subjective interpretations of history and culture. Pendleton’s ten-inch, ceramic black cubes for instance invoke minimalist practices but the rounded sides and corners deliberately shirk off linearity and geometric definition. The highly glazed objects hover between 1970s decoration and contemporary sculpture.

Like the diverse range of art in the show, each of these artists comes to their practice from very different backgrounds, which means that their approaches to what can be termed “contemporary still life” are as varied. Some have roots in traditional painting others work conceptually with language and image. Either way, what unites these artists is that each incorporates both a public and private vocabulary in their practice and, in so doing, a message resounds: In the hand of the artist, no icon is just destined to one meaning; images perpetually shift and signify as their audiences change.

Would it be pure terror or pure narcissism to try to collect every image of yourself taken within a given year and then publish it in a hardbound book format? The project “All of Me” has been percollating in the back of my head for a few years now, and I finally decided last week to dive in and give it a preliminary shot at life. What results so far is a four volume, 400-page each volume compendium of every photograph I could find of myself from 2007. That’s almost 1600 photos, my lord! I made a sample book using the online service blurb.com and got back a preliminary softcover version. I’m waiting for a hardbound version to arrive in a few days. I think I’m gonna go for the hardbound. It reminds me more of an encyclopedia set.

The books will have only one printing (extremely limited edition!).  I’m not even sure if I’ll ever show them or not. All the images are unedited, uncropped, and uncensored for the sake of neutrality and to cast a cold, almost microscopic look on how I am documented through pure image. Some photos are taken by myself, some by friends and lovers, and other by strangers.  

Pure narcissism. Or pure horror. Argh. 

There’ll be a catalog published for the upcoming “The Way That We Rhyme” show at Yerba Buena, and I just pulled together a preliminary mockup for my 2-page spread. It’s going to be a modest size (only 6″ x 9″ book format) but it will be in color, which is always a treat for catalogs. As an accent to the Counterfeit Crochet Project, my inclusion for the catalog is just a slew of images juxtaposing images of the project participants with “real world” counterfeiting images culled from news headlines and media sources.

Some of the images are from sweatshops, one is of a policeman confiscating counterfeit market goods, a knock-off market vendor, and there’s also a steamroller mowing down counterfeit items on the street.  I’m more interested in throwing these types of images into the mix of the project since I feel that a lot of the time people get stuck on the “craft” aspect of it and I want to keep emphasizing the “real world” genesis of the project. I’ve had many folks ask me if crochet is my “thing” and I have to keep insisting that even though the project centers around it as a medium (and definitely deals with the dialogue of the craft and crafting community), it is solidly rooted in my larger practice of trying to work through issues of illicit capitalism and a type of productive resistance.

Trust me, I’m not denying an interest in craft (far from it! Most of my work is heavily process or make-oriented). It’s just that I find it unsatisfying when folks can’t seem to push beyond that simple fact and get stuck on the crochet part. 

Crochet is the medium.Counterfeiting is the message. I insist. 

On another note, I was working with the designer at Yerba Buena today and we were doing some preliminary color test prints for the poster wall that will be in my final installation. I’m pretty excited, I think it’ll be great since it features most of the makers involved in the project. But after working on this catalog spread I’m also inspired to throw in a crazier mix of images and kind of muddy the waters of meaning with the juxtaposition. I have to fill two 4′ x 8′ panel sections of a wall, so that’ll be plenty of space. Niiiiiccce