Bad Disks (Study in Red, White and Silver) detail

But, as Filipino comedian Allan Manalo likes to say (in his humorous introduction to Joey Ayala's CD "Hubad" produced by Bindlestiff Studios): "That's not all!" After seeing—and saying—that people, culture, and other matter are left behind or trashed in the aftermath of technological advances, Syjuco then expands her considerations to one of recovery. Specifically, she recovers trash beyond its context of garbage. In "Bad Disks (Study in Red, White and Silver)," Syjuco lined up computer disks in four columns, with each column comprised of three disks. The simple boldness of the colors and the clean lines on and edging the disks create a work that is effective as a color study, unique for how it creates a "found" grid, and pleasurable for its revelation of a transcendent use of material. Her use of disks that (may) have outlived their utility also obviates time by collapsing past, present and future into an art work's infinity. As she did with her floor-based installations, she offers yet another interpretation to what Jose Rizal (and other sages) has said about the importance of not ignoring the past (an issue that bears repeating among Filipinos, if only because of the return of the U.S. military to the Philippines).

Comparative Morphologies

While still incorporating technologically-related—what she calls "futuristic"—material, Syjuco also commemorates the past with "Comparative Morphologies," a series of digital iris prints on watercolor paper. The material looks like old prints, but the scanned images are contemporary elements such as computer parts, telephone cords, screws and wires. It is significant that Syjuco chose materials that, to her, look "organic, for instance like DNA strands" because, framed in mahogany (or mahogany-looking wood), the works create her desired effect of seeming to be specimens in a museum of natural history. Yet, the actual imagery is of up-to-date elements created through technology instead of that found in nature. And yet again, perhaps that also is her point: if man is nature, as Jackson Pollock once said, then what man creates may be as natural as the traditional definition of the word "nature"—again a subversion of context, which is to say, of control, through her questioning of the more widespread interpretations of the word. (She also wittily explored this differentiation between what are considered natural and artificial in an earlier series entitled "Medusa." There, she evoked Medusa's hair of snakes through a tangle of computer wires; are not roiling snakes quite viscerally "natural"?)

"Untitled (Medusa Series) 2000
Cibachrome print mounted on aluminum
18 x 72 inches
Edition of 3

Again, "that's not all!" Offering yet another conceptual tier, Syjuco conceded that there is a "coldness" to her recent works, but that such chill is deliberate for contravening traditional notions of the "female." This element also signals a progression from her earlier work that did contain "female" elements as ascribed by culturally set definitions of the word; e.g. in "Building Materials Series I," she crocheted green and brown doilies that then were applied to wood as if they were fungi or to evoke tree rings.

Building Materials Series I (Grove) 1998 Crocheted doilies, 2x4s Dimensions variable

Syjuco took her investigation even further. While she took material beyond their inherited contexts, she also doesn't want to "fool the viewer." In her prints, for instance, she makes sure that the edges are visible, not hidden behind mats. The positioning confirms that the prints were browned by the printing process, rather than age. In making lucidity her practice, Syjuco has concluded wisely that she must avoid illusion, even as it seems her works are about such illusion.

By being anti-illusion, Syjuco's aesthetics can be viewed as another way of Filipino decolonization. Her paradoxical failure to achieve a tromp l'oeil effect in her prints and installations' boxes can be read as related to poet Heidi Peppermint's observation that "to pun, especially to pun abundantly, is an anti-imperialist act with a long tradition." Peppermint reminds that a

"genealogy of the pun reveals its politicization, feminization, and demonization in Western Europe beginning with the nation building projects of the seventeenth century. During the Middle-English period, the English language underwent revolutionary changes that brought a wealth of synonyms and an increasing differentiation in usage as well as in meaning and connotation, which was favorable to punning, verbal ambiguity and malapropisms. Despite these resources, English literature developed into a tradition valuing precision more than possibility [partly due to] nation-building colonial agendas […]. Because language played the most important role in forming national consciousness, […] nation-building required dictionaries, grammars and a repression of ambiguity in language use. Furthermore, the colonial project required […] a refusal of difference generally."

While Peppermint was commenting on European history, it's not coincidence that she relates puns to nation-building and colonial agenda. According to scholar (and in-the-closet poet) Vince Rafael, 16th-century Tagalog speakers in the Philippines, forced to listen to friars' sermons in Spanish, would "fish" for words that they understood and later made up their own narratives using those words but with meanings quite unrelated to the friars' original intent. Tomas Pinpin, Rafael notes, was the first native to publish a book in the Philippines and "excelled in punning to simultaneously defer to and evade Spanish missionary expectations."

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