Artist Talk: Stephanie Syjuco, 9/23, 5pm, Carnegie Mellon

Anyone in Pittsburgh tomorrow night? If so, stop on by and see what’s been going on recently in my head…

STEPHANIE SYJUCO
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23
5 PM, GIANT EAGLE AUDITORIUM
BAKER HALL A51
http://www.art.cfa.cmu.edu/news-events-and-calendars/lectures

STEPHANIE SYJUCO is a visual artist who’s recent work uses the tactics of bootlegging, counterfeiting and reappropriation to address issues of cultural biography, labor, and economic globalization. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her objects mistranslate and misappropriate iconic symbols, creating frictions between high ideals and everyday materials. This has included re-creating several 1950s Modernist furniture pieces by French designer Charlotte Perriand but using cast-off material and rubbish in Beijing, China; starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods; photographing models of Stonehenge made from cheap Asian imported food products; and searching for fragments of the Berlin Wall in her immediate surroundings in an attempt to revisit the historical moment of “the end of History.”

Born in the Philippines, she 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, The Contemporary Museum Honolulu, The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, among others. In 2007 she led counterfeiting workshops at artspaces in Istanbul, Beijing, and Manila, and in December 2008 will have a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston that will explore the legacy of Modernism and the Third World. She has had visiting faculty appointments at Stanford University and The California College of the Arts. She lives and works in San Francisco.

Code-Switchers at The LAB opens tonight!

The opening night for an exhibition juried by myself and artist/musician Steve Dye is happening TONIGHT at The LAB in San Francisco. Alas, I won’t be in town to attend it but I was involved in the install process and I’ve heard through sources that the show looks great! Come out to celebrate the over 25 artists included and check it out…

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Code-Switchers
Jurors: Steve Dye and Stephanie Syjuco
The LAB, 2948 16th St @ Capp
San Francisco, CA
http://www.thelab.org

Featuring: Facundo Arganaraz and Nicole Anne Crescenzi, Tim Armstrong, Taha Belal, Terry Berlier, Jan Blythe, Lauren Dicioccio, Claudio Dicochea, Mark Edwards, Ariel Goldberg, Jason Hanasik, Carrie Hott, I, Daughter of Kong, Ace Lehner, Jennifer Little, Sarah Lockhart, Yuki Maruyama, Naomi McCavitt, Klea McKenna, Ranu Mukherjee, Claire Nereim and Julie Cloutier, Kit Rosenberg, Karen Ruenitz, Eric Sidner, Julia Kim Smith and David Beaudouin, James Pitt, Anna Tsouhlarakis, Adrian Van Allen, Melissa Wyman, Eiko Yamamoto, and Aygul Idiyatullina.

Exhibition runs: Sept 17 – Oct 11, 2008
Opening reception: Friday, September 19, 6-9 PM featuring live music by I, Daughter of Kong
Gallery Hours: Wed – Sat, 1-6 PM
Performance evening: Thursday, October 2nd, 8:30 PM: featuring “Pieces of Nine”, an original play directed by Mark Edwards and written by Dylan Latimer which makes use of the internet as a stage; “My Egaugnal”, an experimental video by Aygul Idiyatullina that investigates a longing to find balance between three languages the artist uses in everyday life; and SL Morse – “No Exit by Jean Paul Sartre”, a morse code music performance by Sarah Lockhart in collaboration with Aurora Josephson and Suki O’Kane.

How are contemporary artists dealing with issues of cultural complexity, multiple allegiances, and hybrid forms? How are they communicating these ideas and addressing their audience? Using the metaphor of “code-switching,” a linguistic term referring to the use of more than one language within a single conversation, this juried exhibition investigates a variety of approaches to cultural and material bilingualisms, (mis)translations, appropriations, and the purposeful misuse of “proper” communication codes.

Handmade Nation book is IN PRINT!

It’s a book! No, it’s a movie! No, it’s BOTH!

Man, Faythe Levine and Cortney Heimerl totally blow my mind… I just got the announcement that the "Handmade Nation" book is finally in print (Princeton Architectural Press) and they’ll be sending me promo copies in the mail. Anti-Factory was spotlighted and even mentioned on the back cover and in the press material.

It’s amazing when things like this (books, I mean) become "real"…. super awesome! Those two ladies are so together with the whole thing it’s scary. Stay tuned for the Handmade Nation documentary film coming out in 2009, also featuring myself and lots of other fab folks.

For now, the book is in stock at amazon.com!

quoteries

I don’t think that you are freer artistically in the desert than you are inside a room.

–Robert Smithson

I have never been forced to accept compromise but I have willingly accepted constraints.

–Charles Eames, 1969

We can’t talk about the Third World any more for the one reason that there’s no second world. So even this third world as it used to be is now simply just the slums of one world. It’s just the no-go zone of that one single unified world of Capital.

–Hakim Bey, “Millenium” 1996

Style Council & Metropolis blog

No, not “The Style Council” as in the 80s band, but the section in this issue’s 7×7 magazine published in San Francisco… The folks there came by to do a photoshoot in my studio back in August and the full-page spread came out a few weeks ago. It’s actually kind of hard to believe that after three hours, several outfit changes, and a few set changes, they chose a pic of me on my knees (?), but i guess it’s quirky in some way

click here to read the article in a legible manner…

Also, here’s a posting on Metropolis Magazine’s blog that reports back from the American Craft Council panel that I was on back in August. It was a provocative panel and I know we didn’t nearly address or complete the questions being posed to us (craft/politics stuff) but I think it opened up a good future discussion for everyone involved…

www.metropolismag.com/pov/?p=1070#more-1070

Stark pick in the San Francisco Examiner

Marianna Stark from The Stark Guide sent me a snippet of an article from last Sunday’s San Francisco Examiner featuring both she and I. Thanks, Marianna!

The biotech campus of UCSF (University of California San Francisco) purchased a complete set of prints of mine from 2002, “Comparative Morphologies,” and they’re hanging in the science-y area. Perfect placement, it’s an honor to be mentioned as a favorite and to be a part of the collection in general.

The Berlin Wall for $1.99

I was the highest bidder at $1.99 for a small portion of the Berlin Wall, bought from ebay. Who knows if it’s "real" or not — i just love the idea that i get a chunk of the rock and it’s claiming to be real. My suspension of (dis)belief is a funny thing.

I got it in the mail yesterday and it comes with its own little certificate of authenticity (mass printed, mass produced) and the rock looks like just about any other cement-based chunky rock. I love it. It’s both special and totally unspecial. Just like I thought it would be.

Cultural “covers”: thank you, YouTube

I sent out a list of slightly cheeky links to my undergrad students to look at as part of their class, Material Worlds (a studio class based on the grad seminar class I taught a while ago at CCA). They’re all YouTube videos that I’ve stumbled across (or have been pointed in the direction of, thanks, Christine Wong Yap!) and while not “scholarly” or academic in their scope, can be considered interesting ways that people/groups are dealing with making “copies” of things and uniquely tweaking it based on circumstance and context.

Behold:

“Thriller” remake by actual prisoners in Cebu, Philippines. Yes, I know this one’s circulated the world and is pretty popular with the “weird cultural crossover” crowd, but it still doesn’t take away from the interestingness of it. Exploitative? Sure. But it’s also oddly telling that they would choose a music video dance routine as exercise. O, Philippines!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMnk7lh9M3o

“Ken Lee” song performed on Bulgarian Idol. Valentina Hassan is my new heroine. She has single-handedly redefined the English language. Proudly. I was joking a while back that this video alone could spur an entire series of graduate-level sociology theses.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RgL2MKfWTo

SO much better than the “original”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOR_jq9M53c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wwyeuaP_mI

“more halo 3 weapons”
The costumes and weapons are all based on the video game Halo 3. I personally think this kid is an obsessed genius. The fact that he’s channelling his energies into not just playing the games online but actually trying to recreate aspects of it from scrap and cardboard in the real world blows my mind. He’s even made DIY videos using a sharp steak knife, packing tape, and old boxes. This is one of those cases where I’m glad his parents haven’t taken him to see a psychologist or made him stop creating his own personal arsenal of stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e45J0SCXO5s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0XuLW2uEY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H_bUy_oQjo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4wBQ43uf28

and more to think about with copies: Christina Aguilera’s pop song “Beautiful” resung by a myriad selection of teenage girls in their own personal, heartfelt manner. All the same, and yet all so different! What’s up with expository karaoke and the need for everyone to record themselves singing in their bedrooms?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FtaC5vpUQ8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYsYgTIVcrY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgtmoJyJypw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmE3ruMuffQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOM8_aR3uog

Giant Evil

I’ve been in Pittsburgh for exactly three weeks now and it’s been interesting trying to navigate a whole new city and culture. Granted, it’s not like it’s in another country, but given the size here of these States, it can definitely feel like it. I always joke when traveling domestically that one shouldn’t pack too much and can always get what you need where you find yourself (“it’s not like you’re going to a Third World country or anything!”), but it’s funny how the small differences can add up to make it seem like it’s an entire universe away.

Take the grocery store situation: Giant Eagle is the Pittsburgh version of Safeway in California. The ubiquitous cyan blue plastic shopping bags also double as recycling bags (for some reason one must place all their recyclables into NEW blue plastic shopping bags. Don’t ask me why, it’s rather strange. I guess it completes the logical circle of “one must consume in order to recycle”?). The nice thing is all the pretty blue bags you see everywhere, however. A small color shot in the arm all over town.

Then one day someone joked about having to shop at the “Giant Evil” which I found pretty funny. It really seems there are very few other places than standard grocery stores to buy anything around here — not many mom and pop food stores, bodegas, produce stands, etc. It’s all one Giant Evil I guess.

So these here recycled shoes I saw on flickr by mleak are cute:

I’ve been oddly fascinated with these blue bags and have some thoughts on making a scrappy limited edition work using found material dyed bright blue and stenciled with the logo (only wrong, of course). I’d give ‘em away to friends and locals so they kind of mix in with the “real” bags. Handmade crappy (non-plastic) bags.

Counterfeit Crochet on YouTube

So, back in April (I think?) I participated in a panel discussion on women, art, and politics at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco and wouldn’t you know it: they videotaped it and posted it online. Now it’s floating around YouTube and I just watched it and it’s funny to hear my voice and realize that I actually make sense when I speak about my artwork. Or at least that’s what I think in this case. You be the judge!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz9s4uVZDSc

And I just heard the latest September issue of 7×7 Magazine is out and I have yet to get ahold of a copy…I’m featured in a spread on Anti-Factory and I am sooo curious as to how the photoshoot turned out (2 makeup artists! 2 hairstylists! an art director! three hours! yow!). Seeing as how I’ll be in Pittsburgh for the next few months, I’m not sure I can get ahold of a copy in time — if anyone sees an online link to a digital version, let me know!