Stephanie Syjuco
Monday, 10 May 2010
Work from her Temporal Aggregate/ Social Configuration (Borrowed Beuys) and Unsolicited Fabrications: Shareware Sculptures.
“My recent projects use objects and surfaces that look strangely familiar, manipulating conventions of style and structure to create “mixed-use” items. I have focused my work on issues of “illicit capitalism”—bootlegs, knock-offs, and the reworked commodity—in an attempt to address being an ambivalent subject of forces larger than myself—politics, global economics, capitalism, and the corporate culture machine—all the while maintaining that there is a way to mutate a given set of laws, icons, or imagery, and place them at a new and different service.
Using mostly cheap materials like foamboard, contact paper, tape, scrap wood, and laserjet prints—I have made images and objects that reference architectural or scientific diagrams, electronic equipment, cityscapes, mass-produced goods, and contemporary artworks. What interests me are the mis-translations or mis-appropriations (be they purposeful or accidental) that happen when an image or concept is remade and shifted away from their correct territories, and especially when traveling from the “top” (i.e. the global) on “downwards” (localized communities).” – Stephanie Syjuco