Stephanie Syjuco: Latent Images

About

Drawing on Syjuco’s recent research at the archives of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Latent Images examines the memory of the American empire as preserved and perpetuated through the lens of its own archive. The work is a counterpart to Syjuco's previous work, which served as decolonizing interventions into the same archive’s early 20th-century depictions of the Philippines. The exhibition includes a selection of large-scale photographs, an installation of photographs displayed on an interconnected series of raised platforms, and small color checker images referencing her Chromakey series which investigate race and color in America.

Syjuco’s use of photography in this body of work reiterates the constructed nature of the archival narrative: she photographs archival material (existing photographs, documents, ephemera), enlarges and prints them in segmented tiles 8 1/2 x 11-inch office printing paper that she then physically reassembles in her studio before rephotographing them to achieve her final composition. Visible in the final object is the tape that the artist used to put back together the various segments of the original photo—thus lending the work a trompe l’oeil quality. The reconstructed images are finally printed as high resolution, large-scale digital inkjet prints. This “piecing together,” as Syjuco describes it, points to the mediating gaze of both photography and the archive. Better America Slide (2021) illustrates Syjuco’s exploration of “the archive itself as an imperfect carrier of information.” The image depicts Syjuco’s gloved fingers holding a badly damaged slide inscribed with text that identifies it as part of the “Better American Lecture service,” a mass-produced teaching program used in the 1920s and 1930s. The process of producing a high-quality reproduction of an illegible slide’s snapshot draws attention to what is lost in translation as images and histories are reproduced across time.

In KKK Image (2021), Syjuco presents a composition that initially resembles a cubist collage, but is in fact an arrangement of the back sides of documents belonging to an Ohio chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s. By reversing the records of this hate group, which are found in various locations throughout the Smithsonian’s archives of American History, Syjuco is both denying the legibility of white supremacist propaganda while also demonstrating how deeply embedded it is in the fabric of American national history.

In the center of the main gallery, Platform Installation (2021) reinterprets the psychological and physical experience of archival research. Syjuco layers historical material along with contemporaneous elements into an intentional arrangement that recalls the process of discovery and active reconstruction of the historical narrative.

Also on view in the RL Window will be Block Out the Sun (2021), a video showing a series of images of Syjuco’s hand covering the faces of Filipinx individuals brought to the United States for exhibition as part of the 1906 World’s Fair. Syjuco’s action disrupts the colonial gaze, suspending the repetitious cycle of exploitation and consumption.