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Stephanie Syjuco
Born in the Philippines and currently based in Oakland, Stephanie Syjuco is an artist and assistant professor in sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. Driven by socially engaged projects, she produces large-scale installations and communal workspaces that use elements of craft to challenge perceptions of "types" in contemporary America. Whether with color calibration charts or dazzle camouflage, she shows how the typologies we use to understand objects cannot be uncoupled from the way we categorize people, revealing
contradictory fragments of American identity. Syjuco also explores the manifestation of the handmade within digital processes and virtual networks of dissemination , as seen with her counterfeit crocheted luxury fashion objects based on digital images, historical costumes rendered in "chromakey green" fabric, or hand-sewn tapestries that mimic transparency layers used in image editing tools. Through cultural and economic issues such as notions of citizenship and protest, the legacy of colonialism, the value of labor, and the ethics of standardized systems of production, Syjuco provokes us to interrogate the complicated relationships between objects and our own identities. |