Artworks

For Stephanie Syjuco: Dodge + Burn, a survey exhibition of work from 2004 – present (2024), the Media Room presented Block Out The Sun (2021), Ornament + Crime (Villa Savoye) (2013), and Empire/Other (2013).

Block Out The Sun (2021) is Syjuco’s response to her research for photographic documentation of a faux Filipino village created for the At the 1904 World’s Fair. As a newly-acquired colony of the United States, Filipino culture was showcased for the American public via a living “human zoo,” filled with 1200 imported “natives” performing dances and rituals. Stephanie writes that, “Institutional repositories, archives, and museums are tasked with housing cultural collections, framing historical narratives, and creating research opportunities for future generations. These archives are also rife with omission, racial bias, and a subjective eye toward what should be collected and preserved for posterity. How does one “talk back” to an archive and attempt to potentially re-narrate its documents and images? By physically blocking the images with my hands, I attempted a direct way of intervening with an archive, and thwarting the viewer’s ability to fully consume the people and faces on display. My own body, sitting in the archives, becomes both a temporary shield and a marker of defiance, while at the same time acknowledging that the images still remain.” The project features forty individual images and audio track spanning 100 years of camera shutter sounds.View video excerpt

Ornament + Crime (Villa Savoye) (2013) is a 22-minute HD video, which takes as its starting point architect Le Corbusier's 1931 iconic building, Villa Savoye, located outside of Paris. Borrowing the digital model from SketchUp's open-source network, Syjuco creates a haunting, animated walk-through of the Modernist structure overtaken with disruptive black-and-white graphics of folk patterns culled from France's prior colonial era: Moroccan, Algerian and Vietnamese textiles. As a historical mash-up of publicly sourced files, this new version of Villa Savoye attempts to transcribe the colonial and cultural history of a Western icon back upon itself as if it were a body to be read and re-read. By infecting the visual cues of its colonies onto itself, a closer view of the society that birthed the building can be made.

Empire/Other (2013): For this project, Syjuco worked with digital 3-D modeling and scanning technologies, 3-D printing, and ceramic processes to produce hybrid objects that comment on the frictions and complexities generated by historical empire, colonialism, and their resulting trade routes.