Stephanie Syjuco

Part of an extended print series, this large-scale work focuses on photographs and documents from popular newspapers and articles about the Tasaday, a so-called Stone Age tribe “discovered” in the Philippines in 1971. By excerpting images from printed newsclippings and enlarging them to outsized, handmade proportions, Syjuco attempts to show a fragmented narrative that never quite clearly depicts the ethnographic subject itself, but instead focuses on the captions, headlines, adjacent articles, advertisements, and at times humorously ironic public sentiment that the Tasaday inspired. The hand-rubbed image transfer process uses black and white photocopies, lending the work another level of print mediation, with the tiled-together segments producing a tactile, fragmented whole. Made with multiple studio assistants, the individualized marks become a conceptual nod to the varying vantage points of an ethnographic gaze cast decades ago in the Philippines.