Stephanie Syjuco's work uses reappropriation, bootlegging, and fictional fabrications to address issues of cultural biography, labor, value, and economic globalization. Her sculptural objects and installations mistranslate and misappropriate iconic symbols, creating frictions between high ideals and everyday materials.

As Syjuco writes: "My recent projects use objects and surfaces that look strangely familiar, manipulating conventions of style and structure. . . . 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."

Born in the Philippines, Syjuco earned her BFA from San Francisco Arts Institute and her MFA from Stanford University. Her work has been exhibited at P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum. In October 2009 she presented a parasitic art-counterfeiting event, COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone for Frieze Projects, London, as well as contributed proxy sculptures for P.S.1/MoMA's 1969 joint exhibition.

Syjuco is a faculty member at CCA and has taught at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon University. A recipient of a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, Syjuco's upcoming show, Shadowshop, is a temporary and alternative store/distribution point embedded within the SFMOMA with stock hundreds of artists’ multiples, small works, tchotchkes, catalogs, books, zines, media works, and other output. Shadowshop is a platform for exploring the ways in which artists are navigating production, consumption, and dissemination of their work.

Sponsored by CCA's Graduate Program in Fine Arts

[Image credit (top): Unsolicited Fabrications: Shareware Sculptures, 15 handmade sculptures and single channel video projection, 2009]
[Image credit (bottom): COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone, Frieze Art Fair, London, 2009]