Stephanie Segoko investigates energy dynamics in the museum archives at Ryan Lee – ARTnews.com

The focus of Latent Images, the final exhibition by Stephanie Sioko at Ryan Lee in New York, in 2021- a work called Micro chaotic index (working platform). It consists of a modular composition of low wooden tables, scattered with images printed on paper of various scales and grouped into clear (if not immediately meaningful) systematic groups. Some of these images are sharp; Others are sliced ​​beyond recognition. Many of them reproduce old photographs depicting the landscapes, plants, peoples, and material culture of an island nation in Southeast Asia. Much like Syjuco’s work from the past three years, the installation is the product of archival research, facilitated in part by a Smithsonian Fellowship, exploring the United States’ colonization of the Philippines at the beginning of the century after its defeat of Spain, the country’s former occupier, in the Spanish-American War.

Perhaps not surprisingly, records from this period compiled in Syjuco’s installation say little to the bloodshed that accompanied this imperial campaign. Sometimes the artist hints at it herself, by suggestive juxtaposition. One of the photo collections, for example, combines images of a pistol with a wooden handle, a yellow image of soldiers shown setting up camp in front of a hillside landscape, and an engraving of an American bald eagle. Is this military constellation an example of the “latent” images that the exhibition title refers to? Activating such interconnections would indeed pose a deconstructive challenge to colonial-era knowledge ordering systems. (The origins of Syjuco’s terminology go back to the post-structuralist thinking of Jacques Derrida, who used the term “anarchism” to describe the intrinsic motivations of Freud’s death. Preservation – that these two functions, in fact, are inseparable.) In general, however, the presentation suggests less effort To expose the suppressed reflection on the material and technological conditions of the current vision of the archive. Hence the single most frequent element of the installation: the color calibration scheme, a leitmotif that again appears, sometimes chromatically stacked or inverted (as in the negative), in many other works that were on display.

As the subtitle suggests, Syjuco’s “working platform” is an intermediate stage in its creative process, not an end product. The artist eventually penned her critical input in the form of large, elegantly framed photographs, many of which are also included in the exhibition. Each of these works focuses on a different image—whether it’s a single archival piece or a box value—which Syjuco has enlarged by dividing the image into a grid, printing each cell on a separate letter-sized sheet of paper, and taping these components together to form an integrated, tiled, often Polka dots. At first, this same mosaic looks like it’s installed inside the frames, casting a shadow on the mounting plate behind. Only after that it becomes clear that one is already looking at high-resolution images of the artist’s multi-part compositions; That subtly ornate white space bordering the illustrated prints isn’t actually a backing board but the studio wall it’s pasted on. The result of this perceptual rug pull is a loosening of our focus on the archival objects represented, leading us to think equally about Syjuco’s act of re-introduction and what their transformations might entail, with their proposal for a criminal investigation.

The exhibition’s press release took a metaphorical view of these maneuvers—presenting Syjuco’s focus on mediation and (as the example below) occlusion, along with her work to “assemble” fragmentary images to form composite sets—as a comment on the fact that similarly, the ‘archival’ narrative Compound” is partial in the meaning of the word. Fair enough, but now, references to the biased nature of colonial-era archives are commonplace. Is that all the Syjuco Project reveals?

work like Reverse view: KKK (2021) refers to a parallel view. The central image depicts a stack of papers, photographs, and newspaper clippings that once belonged to an Ohio branch of the Ku Klux Klan and are now in an archival collection (called “Business Americana”) at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC Syjuco has flipped most of these articles , however, to obscure everything the terrorist organization found worthy of preservation, turning it instead into a multi-layered abstraction, reminiscent of a Cubist collage or one of the dynamics of Kurt Schwitters. marzbilder. Thus, even as the title of the work associates its (but strictly censored) images with a history of white racial violence that is still very much alive in the present day, the artist’s intervention allows the material to appear simultaneously like much wrinkled and faded paper. Syjuco points out, in fact, how this historically fragile materialism has defined the limited conditions for access to archives—another factor closely related to the question of how and to whom these groups make history visible.

Syjuco’s process of assembling inkjet prints offers another layer of materiality that mirrors that of its archival documents. Some thirty pages appear in Reverse view: KKKFor example, it began to warp and curl. At the same time, however, the artist’s incorporation of contemporary photographic techniques (and her pixelated productions) points to an increasingly digital world that is in many ways foreign to the historical objects and systems of organization she represented. From these effects emerges another “latency” that some of its earlier projects addressed firsthand: the rise of the Internet as an archive-like structure more powerful and decentralized – with all the potential of good and evil, accessibility and mystery – than anything the people standing in could have imagined. Behind a nation state dating back to the colonial era. What form might an “anarchist index” take in relation to information technology in the twenty-first century? Syjuco’s matryoshka-like images, their overlapping layers of images embodied in media alternately ancient and contemporary, do not provide an answer so much as insisting with formal eloquence on the question.