In her first solo museum show, Stephanie Syjuco presents bootlegged videos, counterfeit remnants of the Berlin Wall, appropriated Houston newspapers, forged modernist furniture, and photographs made with pirated tourist snapshots. Her concept-driven work combines the materiality of digital information and technologies with craft traditions both celebrated and marginalized. With a critical eye, the San Francisco-based artist explores how we construct, perceive, and value cultural authenticity. Today’s global capitalist economy is full of black-market fakes and falsehoods in every stage of production and consumption. Syjuco sees each of these infidelities as an opportunity for agency—her own and the viewer’s. By examining and constructing objects with fictional identities and histories, the artist reveals a larger truth: that we constantly invent narratives about ourselves and about others. (via Contemporary Arts Museum Houston)

In her first solo museum show, Stephanie Syjuco presents bootlegged videos, counterfeit remnants of the Berlin Wall, appropriated Houston newspapers, forged modernist furniture, and photographs made with pirated tourist snapshots. Her concept-driven work combines the materiality of digital information and technologies with craft traditions both celebrated and marginalized. With a critical eye, the San Francisco-based artist explores how we construct, perceive, and value cultural authenticity.

Today’s global capitalist economy is full of black-market fakes and falsehoods in every stage of production and consumption. Syjuco sees each of these infidelities as an opportunity for agency—her own and the viewer’s. By examining and constructing objects with fictional identities and histories, the artist reveals a larger truth: that we constantly invent narratives about ourselves and about others. (via Contemporary Arts Museum Houston)