Photo by Dusty Kessler; courtesy of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States, installation view, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, through December 29, 2019
In Rogue States, currently on display at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, artist Stephanie Syjuco addresses the complexities surrounding citizenship and immigration—the competing narratives, the politicization, the demonization.
Syjuco, who was born in the Philippines and moved to the United States, says that in her experience, “the story of immigration usually goes a lot deeper than just people having recently come over.” It spans America’s colonization of the Philippines over 100 years, and to get a full picture, you have to look beneath the current context. “There’s a lot of interconnection,” she says. “The story today doesn’t show how complicated these international ties are.”
Rogue States presents a broad survey of Syjuco’s work over the last five years. Three of the projects are the result of a summer residency in St Louis with The Luminary on Cherokee Street. Syjuco spent that summer combing through World Fair visual archives to find the ethnographic photos of Filipinos that were displayed at the Fair. Block out the Sun offers a visual representation of Syjuco’s struggle to acknowledge the existence of these images without perpetuating the “stereotyping or the visual violence that can be seen in the photos.”
Photo by Dusty Kessler; courtesy of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States, installation view, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, through December 29, 2019
“My first reaction was to literally block out the viewer’s ability to absorb or own those images,” she says. “It’s a gut reaction, because it’s me placing my hands over the photographs.”
“A lot of people are grappling with historical monuments of the Confederacy,” Syjuco adds. “How do we deal with the past that keeps coming back, but do so in a way that takes into account some of the complexities of the problems of the time?”
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Photo by Dusty Kessler; courtesy of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States, installation view, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, through December 29, 2019
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Photo by Dusty Kessler; courtesy of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States, installation view, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, through December 29, 2019
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Photo by Dusty Kessler; courtesy of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States, installation view, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, through December 29, 2019
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Photo by Dusty Kessler; courtesy of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States, installation view, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, through December 29, 2019
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Photo by Dusty Kessler; courtesy of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States, installation view, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, through December 29, 2019
In Cargo Cults, Syjuco depicts herself as a foreign person, much in the same way that 19th-century ethnographic images presented foreigners as exotic and native. To do this, she styled herself in black and white graphic-patterned clothing that she purchased at a shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska.
“You can see the price tags attached to everything,” she points out. “They disrupt the reading, so there’s an aspect that what you’re looking at is not real in any way. It’s the total construction of an American or Western vision of what the foreign, exotic Filipino person should look like.”
Photo by Dusty Kessler; courtesy of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States, installation view, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, through December 29, 2019
After she shot the photos, Syjuco returned all the clothing, which itself was a representation: a denial of the “reading of this foreign person.”
She considers the exhibit’s two large installations, Neutral Calibration Studies (Ornament + Crime) and Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage), as bookends. The first, Neutral Calibration, was completed before the 2016 election and examines Western imperialism. Dodge and Burn has influences from the election as well as the U.S. incursion into the Philippines 100 years ago. Hundreds of images and objects are set against a neutral gray backdrop (the transparency backdrop on Photoshop). The green used in the exhibit is the color of digital manipulation. “I was trying to show that all these positions are constructed,” she explains, “and are used to tell a politicized story of who belongs and who doesn’t.”
Photo by Dusty Kessler; courtesy of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States, installation view, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, through December 29, 2019
The title installation, Rogue States, presents 22 flags of enemy countries as fictionalized in Hollywood or European films (including Die Hard 2, Ace Ventura, and Coming to America). “There’s a lot of demonization of different countries,” says Syjuco. “These countries are more of a projection of Western anxiety.”
Photo by Dusty Kessler; courtesy of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States, installation view, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, through December 29, 2019
In To the Person Sitting in Darkness, Syjuco creates a physical flag for a verbal description provided by Mark Twain in his 1902 essay of the same name. Twain critiques U.S. imperialism and any Western nation that attempts to conquer non-Western nations. The flag replaces the American flag’s stars with skull and crossbones and its white stripes with black.
“When I discovered this, I was like, this is amazing,” says Syjuco. She had a link between past and present, “a bridge between a local Missouri hero who is incredibly anti-imperialist and some of the ways in which we should be critiquing what’s happening today.”
The exhibit is on display at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis through December 29.
