Stephanie Syjuco

Stephanie Syjuco (born 1974) is mixed-media conceptual artist based in San Francisco. She studied at the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA 1995) and Stanford University (MFA 2005). She creates large-scale spectacles of collected cultural objects, cumulative archives, and temporary vending installations, often with an active public component that invites viewers to directly participate as producers or distributors. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, creating frictions between high ideals and everyday materials. Notable projects include:

• "Comparative Morphologies", exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in which dissected and mutated computer mice, cables, and connectors were portrayed in the style of a 19th-century botanical print
• "Multi-User Interfaces" and "Non-Specific Product Units", a collection of small objects, each built in the familiar woodgrain-and-black-plastic style of late 20th century consumer electronics, but with no apparent function
• "Black Markets", a series of re-imagined shops: photographs of marketplaces with the products digitally blacked out, and museum installations with the familiar decor and shelving design of a high-end boutique, but displaying unidentifiable lumps of "merchandise" wrapped in black papier-mache.
• Syjuco encourages amateur crochet hobbyists to make "counterfeit" high-fashion handbags entirely out of yarn---including crocheted buckles, zippers, Louis Vuitton logos, etc.

Her work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

External links

• Www.stephaniesyjuco.com
• Shadowshop project at SFMOMA
• Counterfeit Crochet Project
• Young artists on the verge. San Francisco Chronicle article
• Stephanie Syjuco SPARK episode
• ‘Alien She’ Exhibit Explores the Connection Between Punk Rock and Fine Art KQED article