by Lis Bensley
How do you change a deeply embedded narrative? You can lie or invent “alternative facts.” You can deny history altogether. Or, like multi-media artist Stephanie Syjuco, you can contest official accounts and hope the truth prevails. In Dodge + Burn, a stunning 20-year survey at Catharine Clark Gallery, Syjuco examines her Philippine-American heritage through the lens of American colonialism, manipulating and reconstructing familiar imagery to expose lies and malicious stereotypes. It’s an all-too-common strategy these days, but Syjuco employs it with uncommon rigor and variety.
Fueling this exhibition are artifacts and photographs Syjuco has uncovered over years of rifling through museum archives for century-old ethnographic images of her people. Photographic monkeywrenching, juxtapositions of historical and contemporary themes, outlandish set pieces (like the one pictured above) and sculptures are just some of the devices she employs to challenge persistent racial, economic and cultural narratives.
Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage), a wall-sized diorama-like installation that’s the show’s titular work, takes its title from the photographic technique used to lighten or darken images. It includes mannequins in handsewn colonial garb, surrounded by objects painted chroma key green, tiki torches, patterned fabrics, MAGA hats and plastic vegetation dispersed amid old photos – all of which serve to focus attention on America’s colonization of the Philippines during the early 1900s, but also, more generally, assaults on Asians in all spheres. One such image, nearly obfuscated by surrounding foliage, depicts Japanese-American women in internment camps sewing nets to camouflage American military vehicles; it calls attention to violations of citizenship rights suffered by Japanese-Americans during WWII. No laughing matter, but Syjuco manages to inject humor by littering the tableaux with tiny emojis of poop, fish and fists.
RAIDERS, a sculpture, employs reproductions of Asian ceramics “stolen” from the Asian Museum in San Francisco. These life-size replicas sit atop pallets and packing crates, a reference, no doubt, to looted artifacts. Shutter/Release, another play on photographic terminology, features ghost-like pictures from 19th and 20th-century ethnographic photo collections depicting the native Filipino population as racially inferior. Using PhotoShop, Syjuco erased their visages, liberating the subjects from the “colonial gaze.”
The Set-up series of photos deflates the myth of the American West by turning the famed Remington cowboy ass-outward and painting it black, thereby draining it of power. Elsewhere, a series of details from old paintings show men’s hands up to no good: whipping, shooting and pointing. These crimes, as several works demonstrate, continue, visible in images from the Chroma Key Aftermath series, wherein inkjet prints painted green highlight the aftermath of political demonstrations Syjuco witnessed, showing debris and trampled vegetation littered with bricks, sticks and rocks. Several other prints, titled Neutral Orchids, examine neutrality and erasure, with exotic plants representing notions of otherness. Here, Syjuco spray-painted the blossoms with gray primer, an act intended to evoke the whitewashing of history. The plants all died, she sheepishly admitted during an exhibition preview. “But one started to bloom again,” she added proudly, “as though it were fighting back.”
In Fixed Focus (Dead Center), a grid of 36 typed excerpts from the archives of Dean Worcester, an explorer and defender of American Imperialism in the Philippines, Sjyuco focused her camera on notations in which factual errors were corrected. “The errors,” the artist says, “became the central focus, as opposed to the anthropological ‘findings’ that served to support white superiority and early notions of eugenics.”
Cargo Cults, one of the artist’s best-known series owing to the appearance of one such image on the April 2018 cover of Art in America, shows Syjuco placing herself in the position of the colonized “other” by clothing herself in layers of “ethnic” fabrics from brand-name apparel companies, with price tags dangling. The set-up here, one of several, shows her swathed in (and surrounded by) patterns resembling an Op-ish maze, a perfect metaphor for the artist’s longstanding study of the often-murky reality of global commodity production.
Photographic color calibration cards mounted throughout the show as separate pieces or as part of other works call attention to the potential fallacy of “correct” color. While accurate color is always desirable, particularly when it comes to conveying skin tones, the notion can also be twisted to perpetuate damaging racial stereotypes, a point Syjuco takes pains to make throughout much of her oeuvre. The virtue of such efforts resides in the material inventions and the conceptual brio she brings to the task.
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Stephanie Syjuco: “Dodge + Burn, a Survey Exhibition of Work from 2004 to the Present” @ Catharine Clark Gallery through May 4, 2024.
About the author: Lis Bensley is an award-winning author of the novel The Glimpse about artists of the Abstract Expressionist era. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, The New Mexican, ArtNews, Elle Decor, Fine Cooking and others. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA.
