Stephanie Syjuco

Interview - Catharine Clark - Founding Director

"Catharine Clark Gallery has represented Stephanie Syjuco’s work since 2008. The gallery presented her photographs at Paris Photo, initially in our 2016 debut booth. What encouraged us about the response to that presentation was that at the time, Syjuco was one of a few artists at the fair who didn’t identify as a photographer. The photographs in our booth were noticed by a curator from MoMA, NY, who then selected them for the subsequent 2018, “New Photography” exhibition titled “Being” at the museum, where her work was presented alongside that of Paul Sepoya and Carmen Winant, other artists who were/are thinking critically about what it means to be human and about the history of photography. Like those artists, Syjuco uses photography as part of a multivalent practice that stems from an interest in how systems of documentation, whether the camera or the archive, participate in furthering racialized and problematic narratives. As an artist who does not identify as a photographer (and who works in sculpture, installation, video, and craft-informed mediums), she views the camera as one of many tools at her disposal to dissect constructed stories about what it means to be an American."

"Born in the Philippines in 1974, Syjuco 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 in New York, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, The Getty Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. She was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC in 2019–20 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. Her subject matter is particularly cogent when we consider it against the backdrop of growing global misinformation.

The gallery values Syjuco’s smart and meticulously crafted artworks, irrespective of the medium, because they question how photography is implicated in the construction of exclusionary narratives around history and citizenship. These are themes that resonate with our programming more generally and felt relevant to present in the context of Paris Photo 2024. Syjuco’s work deepens the conversation around representation without making work that is necessarily specific to her ethnicity. Her approach is inclusive and incisive. The images she creates are alluring—thoughtfully and beautifully rendered—drawing people to them visually and holding their attention through their complexity—characteristics of the approach that many artists in our roster take. For the most recent Paris Photo, we presented a cross-section of her works from as early as 2016 up to those made in 2024. The survey of photographs was hung salon style, resembling an exploded archive or sorts—archives have been a rich resource for her subject matter and inform her works that are in Prospect.6 New Orleans and the Hawai’i Triennial, two current exhibitions in the United States. The presentation also owed something to the layout of her photographs in the monograph titled “The Unruly Archive,” published by Radius Books last year."