San Francisco artist Stephanie Syjuco will lecture tomorrow (Tuesday March 30th) at 5pm at Gallery 400 as part of UIC’s ongoing Voices lecture series. According to the artist’s website, Syjuco is also slated for a solo exhibition at Gallery 400 in September of 2010. Syjuco’s work resides in the realm of the copy: the bootleg, the body double, the knock-off. Commissioned for a piece to be presented at last year’s Frieze Art Fair in London, Syjuco set up a booth and called it COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone, where she and other artists busily produced small-scale reproductions of lesser-known works based on other famous art works: third generation copies-cum-tchotkes priced at a fraction of the price of the original. Described on the Frieze Foundation website as a “parasitic workshop,” Syjuco’s copy stand apparently did brisk business at the fair.
COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone, at Frieze Art Fair
Recently Syjuco was featured in a solo exhibition titled notMOMA at Washington State University at Pullman, which closed last week. For this show, Syjuco teamed up with Washington State University art students to recreate, by hand, famous works of art from MoMA’s permanent collection. “A fully handmade show,” as Syjuco’s statement describes it, “notMOMA attempts to bridge a gap in students’ understandings of “high art” and invites them to access the works via their own do-it-yourself collective vision. Whether considered copies, translations, or even mis-translations, all resulting works are unique expressions in their own right. As an illicit traveling exhibition “borrowed” from their collection, notMOMA creates a dialogue between WSU’s art department and an inaccessible, perhaps reluctant art institution located on the other side of the country.”
Partial installation view with student-made notMOMA exhibition with approximations of Pollock, Calder, Oldenburg, Richter, Hesse, Warhol, Gober, Mondrian, Eames, and more…
Syjuco also recently started an extremely cool website, particulated matter, that provides a centralized collection of artists books made through print-on-demand processes. She links entries to the publication’s homepage, where they’re available for purchase or download.
Syjuco’s lecture definitely seems worth checking out. The talk will be held in the Gallery 400 Lecture Room, 400 South Peoria Street, and admission is free.
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