Mar 30, 2010, 5:00 PM
Gallery 400

Stephanie Syjuco: Artist Lecture

Stephanie Syjuco’s recent work uses the tactics of bootlegging, reappropriation, and fictional fabrications 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 using cast-off material and rubbish in Beijing, China; starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods; and searching for fragments of the Berlin Wall in her immediate surroundings in an attempt to revisit the moment of capitalism's supposed global triumph.

Born in the Philippines, Syjuco currently lives and works in San Francisco. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at 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. Throughout 2007 she led counterfeiting workshops at art venues in Istanbul, Turkey; Beijing, China; and Manila, Philippines. In October 2009 she presented a parasitic art counterfeiting event, "COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone" in Frieze Projects, London; and contributed proxy sculptures for P.S.1/MoMA's joint exhibition, "1969." She is a recipient of numerous awards, including a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award.