Chapter Three: Stephanie Syjuco

January 30, 2021 - February 28, 2021
Mānoa Campus, Commons Gallery, Art Building

The Commons Gallery, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa (UHM), is pleased to present a new work by Stephanie Syjuco in a solo presentation as part of the year-long exhibition series Out of the Camera: Beyond Photography.

Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation to explore capitalism, power, and the mediated image. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of history and citizenship. The series "Diversity Pictures (Multiethnic Group of People Smiling)", 2020, presented here for the first time, asks how the promise of a multicultural and ethnically diverse society is envisioned and packaged. By combing through stock photography databases via a search for the term diversity, Syjuco presents an array of odd, humorous, and even baffling descriptions sourced verbatim from their image captions.

What is left out are the images themselves, however, leaving the viewers to conjure their own vision of how diversity is often pictured. Color blocks of brownish-beiges, grays, and muddied colors create backdrops for the captions, and are the color-average of each individual image. The images under scrutiny are constructed with a societal togetherness that borders on wishful thinking and captioned by commercial photographers betraying a white male bias. Syjuco’s presentation implicates the viewers into asking, “What’s missing from these pictures?”

Image: Stephanie Syjuco, "Diversity Pictures (Multiethnic Group of People Smiling)", 2020, digitally-printed adhesive vinyl panels on wall


Ticket Information
Following COVID-19 protocols. Gallery hours: Viewable from outside. Parking fees may apply during weekdays; parking is usually free on Sundays.

Event Sponsor
Art & Art History, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Sharon Tasaka, 808-956-8364, gallery@hawaii.edu, https://hawaii.edu/art/out-of-the-camera-stephanie-syjuco/

Share by email