There’s a jungle between the pillows. A farmer in the well-kept shag
rug. A girl three inches tall on the kitchen floor. This is the
interior of Stephanie Syjuco’s apartment, the landscape where she
lives. While making this artwork, which involves small cutouts of
tourist photos from the internet set all over her home, as if the third
world is invading the first one, she considers, among other things,
whether she is a “counterfeit” Filipina.
Syjuco is an artist based in San Francisco who shows at James Harris
Gallery in Seattle. She was born in the Philippines, but she left while
she was young; she travels back, but she is a type of tourist there
now. Her last solo show here, in 2005, was called Black
Market and included photographs of Filipino markets with the
commodities blacked out, along with sculptures of actual commodities
wrapped entirely in black latex, in their own way redacted and
glaringly blank. Her new work portrays hot spots of overdetermined
blankness and exposes her personal environment to the camera this
time—she made a point of not tidying up or staging her own
stuff before setting the stagy cutouts and taking her photographs, each
of which is not so much a single shot but a clue, a symptom of an
anxious condition. What are the images that hide out in your house?
Touristic distortion is achieved by distance. That’s why Syjuco’s
response—bringing these images home to roost—makes
natural and upsetting sense. In addition, the photographs of her
little domestic installations are shot at varying distances, as if
deciding how to shoot were itself the subject. A series of 80 slides
shown, family-style, on an old-fashioned projector and stand-up screen,
is an exercise in the zoom function. The early images in the series are
mostly of the apartment at a distance of several feet, and then slowly,
in successive photographs, the camera moves in until the brightly
colored and pixilated cutouts are seen close-up, with very little
background. Then, as the slide show nears its end, the view zooms out
again—and this time, everything looks newly suspect. Is that a
Filipino hut or a bottle of shampoo on the edge of the tub? Which
belongings represent an individual and which represent a generic
construct? What do we actually own? 
