It’s wonderful to see a final edit of the SPARK* KQED documentary that just wrapped and aired on local Channel 9 last Wednesday and Friday. The wonderful director/producer, editor, and sound guy really put together a quality piece that features myself and The Counterfeit Crochet Project. Below is the listing for the final air dates of the show, but it’s also permanently archived online so you can watch it on streaming video!

And from the website:

What is Spark?
Produced by KQED Public Television, Spark is about Bay Area artists and arts organizations — it is a weekly television show, an educational outreach program and a Web site. More than a showcase for art objects and the artists who make them, Spark takes the audience inside the creative process to witness the challenges, opportunities and rewards of making art.

SCHEDULE - Upcoming Broadcasts
Spark airs on Wednesdays at 7:30pm on KQED-TV 9 and KQET-TV 25 and on Saturdays at 4pm on KTEH-TV 54. Repeat broadcasts can also be seen on KQED’s digital channels.

Monday, May 12, 2008
KQED Channel 9
Salimpour, Syjuco, and Yi – 3:00am
KQED HD
Salimpour, Syjuco, and Yi – 3:00am
KQED Life-Encore
Salimpour, Syjuco, and Yi – 12:00pm

Tuesday, May 13, 2008
KQED Channel 9
Salimpour, Syjuco, and Yi – 2:30am
KQED HD
Salimpour, Syjuco, and Yi – 2:30am

Wednesday, May 14, 2008
KQED HD
Salimpour, Syjuco, and Yi – 7:00pm

You could say that I’ve been a media whore lately — due to the fact that we have this lovely internet thing here, there are so many ways to archive and keep video snippets of interviews, presentations, and more all in one place.

A few weeks ago I was on a rather amusing early Sunday morning local TV show called “Bay Sunday”< along with “The Way That We Rhyme” exhibition curator Berin Golonu and we talked with interviewer Sydnie Kohara about the show. It was taped at the Channel 5 KPIX/CBS-5 tv station downtown and it was really strange to sit at a pseudo-CNN style desk and yammer on about feminism and art and the like.

And then I just noticed that the panel discussion “The Political is Personal” that I was a part of a few weeks ago at the Commonwealth Club of SF has just been archived online and everyone gets to partake in the glory of me expounding the virtues of the Counterfeit Crochet Project. I always think it’s surreal to see oneself on video. Is that really what I sound like? Is that really what I said? omg! The whole panel is rather long, but they indexed it so you can skip on to my segment if you only have ten minutes!

Upcoming is the KQED “Spark” episode that documents my recent studio practice as well as the install and creation of the Counterfeit Crochet Project at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (that the lovely Berin curated), and it’ll air on TV in about two weeks. Yow! It was a great experience to be a part of the process and work with the editor, Adriane Calo, who was super professional and such a pleasure to be around (along with the fabulous video and sound crew). They really know how to bust out a documentary on a (relatively) shoestring public TV budget it seems :). It’ll air on Channel 9 (KQED) on May 7, at 8pm PST.

And for the record, here’s a radio broadcast by Pacific Time radio program host Nguyen Qui Duc covering the “Forged Realities” show I was a part of last year in Beijing.

The internet is AWESOME. And strange in that it becomes a permanent record of everything that gets videotaped or recorded. wow.

I started working on this project a year or two ago and then it got put on the backburner due to other pending deadlines and projects. But I’ve thrown new energy into it since the thought of stacks (thousands!) of these colored newspapers in stacks and on palettes are making me all dreamy and feeling wondrous. Based on the blocks of images and text taken from Filipino-American newspapers like Manila Mail and The Philippine Guardian — both examples of local “ethnic” journals — to which I assign basic colors to text, headlines, images, ads, etc to create color fields. As a translation of ethnically-specific information, it’s a meditation on communication and cross-cultural difference.

All this images are mockups of the work in progress — I’m fishing for price quotes to get a full-color newspaper printed, and it is DAMN expensive, let me tell you. Not sure what I can do to mitigate my circumstances, but I think I’m going to have to do some creative accounting to pull this one off. Sigh!

pages 1-3 of The Philippine Guardian

the entire edition of The Philippine Guardian all laid out flat

More info regarding the roundtable being held tomorrow at CCA (San Francisco campus). Can’t wait to gather with all these wonderful ladiez! Power power power!

Feminism and Art Today
A Roundtable Discussion

Friday, April 11th4-6
Reception to follow
Timken Lecture Hall
California College of the Arts
1111 8th St.
San Francisco

Since the opening of Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution at LA MoCA last year, scores, if not hundreds, of interventions into the high-cultural arena have enriched an on-going interrogation of contemporary feminisms in relation to the production of culture around the globe. An array of publications, exhibitions, demonstrations, colloquia, artist talks, roundtables, performances, interviews, seminars, fundraisers, retreats, workshops, conferences, broadcasts, and screenings have served as platforms for feminist historical revision and cultural exchange. Cornelia Butler, curator of Wack!, argues that “feminism’s impact on the art of the 1970s constitutes the most influential international ‘movement’ of any during the postwar period” and the New York Times critic Holland Cotter makes the similar claim that, without feminism, “identity-based art, crafts-derived art, performance art and much political art would not exist in the form it does, if it existed at all. Much of what we call postmodern art,” he concludes, “has feminist art at its source.”

Feminism and Art Today, a roundtable, hosted by the Visual and Critical Studies program at California College of the Arts, lends impetus to contemporary feminist initiatives in the arts while contributing to the analysis of both the rhetoric and the art circulating currently within art-world and academic contexts. We have invited art historians, artists, curators, critics, and art administrators who actively participate in the expansion of feminist cultural arenas to engage in conversation with CCA students and faculty members, as well as members of the wider community, about the influx of institutional interest in feminism. We ask, “Why now? What are the political stakes? Where are the silences and blind spots? What comes next?” We aim to create a space for public dialog and intergenerational exchange about contemporary visual culture that engages with feminist issues, provokes feminist analysis, and raises social consciousness.

Participants:

Kim Anno is a painter, bookmaker, and public artist. Recently she has been included in exhibitions at the Varnosi Museum in Hungary, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Art Gallery at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco. She has received a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Purchase Award through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Honolulu Academy of Arts, and also a Eureka Fellowship through the Fleishhacker Foundation. She is Assistant Chair of Painting/Drawing and Professor in Community Arts and Graduate Program in Fine Arts.

Tammy Rae Carland is a photographer and video artist. She is co-chair of Photography at CCA and Associate Professor in the Graduate Program in Fine Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies. She is also the co-owner of Mr. Lady Records and Videos. She has shown her work in New York, Los Angeles, North Carolina, and San Francisco and has screened her video work internationally. Her work is featured in The Way That We Rhyme: Women, Art & Politics at Yerba Beuna Center for the Arts, SF.

Jill Dawsey is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City. She has taught at San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, and the University of California, Irvine, in addition to serving as Curatorial Associate in painting and sculpture at SFMOMA. With Maria del Carmen Carrión, she is co-curator of the show Small Things End, Great Things Endure at the New Langton Gallery, SF.

Berin Golonu, a graduate of the Visual Criticism program at CCA, joined the curatorial department at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2003. There, she holds the post of Associate Visual Arts Curator. She has organized numerous exhibitions, most recently The Way That We Rhyme: Women, Art & Politics, and has published critical writings in Afterimage, Aperture, Art Nexus, Art Papers, Contemporary, Flash Art, frieze, and Sculpture. Before coming to San Francisco she served as editor-in-chief of Artweek magazine

Jessica Hough is director of the Mills College Art Museum. She was formerly Curatorial Director at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum where she worked for over nine years and organized more than forty exhibitions. Her groundbreaking show at Mills College, Don’t Let the Boys Win, featured work by Kinke Kooi, Carrie Moyer, and Lara Schnitger. Recent publications include Catherine Opie: 1999 & In and Around Home and Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration.

Patricia Maloney is the Associate Curator at Ampersand International Arts, San Francisco. Formerly Curatorial Assistant for the Matrix Program at the UC Berkeley Art Museum, she has coordinated one-person exhibitions for Cerith Wyn Evans, Catherine Sullivan, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Chiho Aoshima, Angela Bulloch, Cai Guo-Qiang, Anna Von Mertens, Jim Campbell, Helen Mirra, Simryn Gill, Julie Mehretu, and Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Her show Make You Notice recently opened at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery.

Pamela Peniston is a founder and Executive Director of Qcc - The Center for Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Art & Culture and Artistic Director of the National Queer Arts Festival. She designed sets for theatre, television and computer graphics, receiving 7 gold medals for graphics and Art Direction from the Broadcast Design Association. Her photos will be part of an exhibition of Women’s Travel Photography at Femina Potens later this year. She has served on committees developing guidelines for the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Cultural Equity Endowment as well as Innovative Partnership and Cultural Equity Grant programs. She has worked as a writer, workshop/trainer and designer for Cultural Odyssey, particularly The Medea Project, Theater for Incarcerated Women.

Moira Roth is Trefethen Professor of Art History at Mills College. She has edited four books, and in 1998, published her first volume of collected essays Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage (with a commentary by Jonathan D. Katz). Since then, the poetic texts comprising her “Library of Maps” have appeared in various journals and provided the narrative basis for an opera with composer Pauline Oliveros. Other recent collaborations include the performance pieces “Dancing/Dreaming Izanami and Amaterasu” and “Once-upon-a-time: Amaterasu, the Blind Woman and Hiroshima,” with the dancer Mary Sano, and, with the artist Dinh Q. Lê, “From Vietnam to Hollywood: ‘A Play of Ebb and Flow.’” Her awards and honors include the Women’s Caucus for Art’s Mid-career Art History Award (1989) and the Lifetime Achievement Award (1997); an Honorary Ph.D., San Francisco Art Institute, 1994; and the Frank Jewett Mather Critic’s Award for lifetime achievement, College Art Association 2000.

Stephanie Syjuco is a visual artist whose recent projects use the tactics of counterfeiting, bootlegging, and reappropriation to deal with issues of cultural biography and explore economic power structures on a broader scale. She has shown work 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. In 2007 she exhibited a collaborative project at artspaces in Istanbul, Beijing, and Manila, and this year is participating in both The Way That We Rhyme at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, and We Interrupt Your Program (curated by Marcia Tanner) at Mills College. She has held visiting faculty positions at the California College of the Arts, Stanford University, and UC Berkeley.

Tina Takemoto is a writer, performance artist, and associate professor of visual studies at the California College of the Arts. Under the name Her/She Senses, she has collaborated with Angela Ellsworth since 1992. They have presented their installation-based performances internationally. They have been awarded numerous grants, including a New Forms Regional Initiative Grant from Diverse Works and Mexi-Arte, an Art Matters, Inc. fellowship, and a New Forms Regional Grant from the Painted Bride Art Center. She also performs with Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens. Her articles have appeared in Art Journal, Performance Research, College Literature, and the anthology Thinking Through the Skin. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Love/Sick: Illness, Collaboration, and Grief in Performance.

********************

Consult the following site for more information about this and other VCS activities http://sites.cca.edu/currents/

Just sent out earlier today: updates on future events, talks, TV shows (!), etc:

Dear friends,
The past few weeks have been busy for me, with more events to come… Please mark you calendars for a few upcoming exhibitions, talks, and even two TV spots (yow!). Note the special Counterfeiting Workshops I will be leading during the course of the Yerba Buena exhibition — if you find yourself free those particular Saturday afternoons, show yourself and say hi– it’s cheaper than going shopping downtown! Also, watch out for a KQED Spark television feature (with me and Margaret Cho on the same bill!), airing May 7. Details below…

——————————
PANEL DISCUSSION
——————————
Feminism and Art Today
Friday, April 11, 4-6pm
California College of the Arts, Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco, CA
http://www.cca.edu

Organized by Tirza Latimer and featuring a wide array of scholars, curators, and artists, including: Kim Anno, Tammy Rae Carland, Jill Dawsey, Berin Golonu, Jessica Hough, Patricia Maloney, Pamela Peniston, Moira Roth, Stephanie Syjuco and Tina Takemoto.

————————————
CURRENT EXHIBITIONS:
————————————
The Way That We Rhyme: Women, Art, Politics 
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco
March 28 - July 29, 2008
http://www.ybca.org

In conjunction with this multi-faceted show I’ll be leading informal, drop-in Counterfeiting Workshops where you can learn how to crochet, freshen up your pre-existing skills, brush up on your Marx and Adam Smith, or just hang out and converse about bootleg economies and ways of critiquing the capitalist system. I’ve got all the materials and tools available, so just show up for the action! Participation is FREE with general gallery admission, no sign-ups required, just drop by

Counterfeiting Workshops!
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; at the Counterfeit Crochet installation, main galleries
Saturday, April 19, noon to 5pm
Saturday, May 10, noon to 5pm
Saturday, May 24, noon to 5pm
Saturday, June 14, noon to 5pm

more info at http://www.counterfeitcrochet.org

Take Action: 83 Ways to Change the World
Museum of World Cultures, Goteborg, Sweden, 1/08 - 1/09

The Art of Diorama
Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, CA
http://www.bedfordgallery.org

———————————
FUTURE EXHIBITIONS:
———————————

Vested Interests
May 25 - September 6, 2008
Kohler Art Center
Sheboygan, WI

Solo Exhibition
James Harris Gallery
June, 2008
Seattle, WA
http://www.jamesharrisgallery.com

Futura Manila
August 29 - September 29, 2008
Osage Gallery, Hong Kong

Inappropriate Covers
April 11 - May 24, 2009
David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University
Providence, RI

———
MEDIA
———
KQED “Spark” television documentary airing Wednesday, May 7, 2008 (on Bay Area channel 9); featuring Suhaila Saliimpour, Margaret Cho, Stephanie Syjuco, and Lu Yi. http://www.kqed.org/arts/spark/episode.jsp?eid=196865

CBS Channel 5 (KPIX) interview with curator Berin Golonu and artist Stephanie Syjuco, airing Sunday morning, April 14, 2008.

San Francisco Examiner coverage of “The Way That We Rhyme” exhibition, March 27, 2008.
http://www.examiner.com/a-1305129~Women_artists_talk_politics.html

San Francisco Chronicle review of “The Way That We Rhyme” exhibition by Kenneth Baker, April 9, 2008.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/09/DDAT100EUJ.DTL&type=art

Cover image: SF Camerawork Journal, February 2008 issue, featuring
“Personal Protest (Catalyst for Change),” mixed media, 2006
http://www.sfcamerawork.org

——————
Cheers to all!

-stephanie
http://www.stephaniesyjuco.com
http://www.stephaniesyjuco.wordpress.com

Imagine my surprise when i checked on my counterfeitcrochet.org website and saw that it was SHUT DOWN due to too much traffic — argh! I had to upgrade and buy more traffic for the site and it should be back up in 24 hours (puh-lease!). What a big bummmmmmmer in the meantime! Sorry, folks, that you’re getting error messages and not getting access to all the groovy and fine info on it.

But today I went in to the gallery and took some awesome installation shots of the work. They’re all uploaded to my flickr account, with some selections below. I did an hour long workshop with about 20 of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts staff and had them all crocheting little bits of things in that amount of time. It was great to see the space so active, but alas I only have photos of the very tail end of it when four ladies stayed through their lunch hour to work on their own… how fab!

My art website has been sitting forlornly without much project updating for the past year — woe to anyone who has stumbled across it and thought I hadn’t been making new work, which is what it seemed like, ack! Added are a few new projects, some works in progress, and just a general spiffiness and updatey-ness. Took all day but considering the website is the main window into just what the hell is going on in my world, it’s totally worth it…

I’m soooo excited: after scanning numerous high-end interior design magazines for just the right types of classical and Modernist furniture images to use in my “Strange Attractor” drawings series, I realized that buying auction catalogs on Ebay were the most expedient and straightforward way of accumulating said types of imagery. For only the low, low price of $9.99 (for most of ‘em, at least), i am the very proud owner of a wealth of images that are ripe for cutting up and juxtaposing next to strange blob-like tracings of consumerist items that are culled from magazines and catalogs.

Er. Yeah. Not the most apt description of what’s going on. But don’t worry. I’ll post images of them as they come. Heh heh. For now, here are but a few of the future pedestals for capitalist conglomerations. My cup runneth over, it’s so happy!

I love behind-the-scenes photos, especially of museum and gallery art installations. There’s something about seeing art laying about on the ground and watching other artists fussing over their work that is so appealing. Like a type of demystification and exotification all at once!

Behold: photos of install week for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts exhibition “The Way That We Rhyme: Women, Art & Politics” that opened last Friday and includes my Counterfeit Crochet project…

two walls of the Countefeit Crochet Project room are starting to come together…

Taraneh Hemami working on her meticulously placed broken glass and ashes “carpet” on the floor outside my space

SWOON and friend step back to admire their construction of discarded wood and paper cuts

Emily Roysden’s text wall in progress

Suzanne Lacey’s archive treasure trove of documents. I love the way the white on white of the shelves and boxes play off of each other. Super minimalism!

Lisa Ann Auerbach’s red knitted American flag adorning the entryway to the main galleries

Nao Bustamante and friend arranging her video installation in the lobby of YBCA

Vaginal Davis’ ultrapink room in progress. She was an amazing install neighbor and the biggest most joyful dragqueen in the universe.

My space with plastic-covered tables getting a hit of red paint in the center container portions

YBCA bright orange dolly/cart. Just because it’s so lovely with the purple logo spray painted on.

The beginnings of the “swatch wall” that takes up 1/3 of my installation space. Folks will be able to add little crochet swatches and projects here as the show progresses….

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!