Description

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The artist's first monograph thoughtfully weaves her research-based practice with a substantial array of visual source material.

Bound in a unique format with different types of paper, the pages are cut and layered to simulate the process of physically excavating folders in an archive. By examining the blind spots, holes, and fragments of these collections, she examines the ways photography, anthropology, and national archives produce and proliferate images of exclusion and cultural Othering.

Using techniques of layering, blocking, digital manipulation, pixelating, blowing up, and taping together, the artist's work ultimately seeks to "talk back" to the archive and find agency in challenging its images. As she states in the book's introduction, "I do not make work about Filipino identity; I make work about the white gaze, and those are two totally different things."

About the Author

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Stephanie Syjuco (b. 1974, Philippines) received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, and a Tiffany Foundation Award. Her work is in numerous collections, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Getty, Los Angeles, CA; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; among others. She was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History and is featured in the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. A long-time educator, she is an Associate Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California.