The Sorcerer’s Burden

I do not make work about Filipino identity; I make work about the white gaze, and those are two totally different things.

— Stephanie Syjuco

The Unruly Archive is Syjuco’s first monograph, weaving together her research-based practice with a substantial array of visual source material. Bound in a unique format with different types of paper, the pages are cut and layered to simulate the process of physically excavating folders in an archive. In Syjuco’s own words, the book is "a type of forensics...what it is like to piece together a vision of an entire country and people—the Philippines, Filipinos, and by extension, Filipinx Americans—through the lens of the American colonial archive."

By examining the blind spots, holes, and fragments of these collections, she examines the ways photography, anthropology, and national archives produce and proliferate images of exclusion and cultural Othering. Using techniques of layering, blocking, digital manipulation, pixelating, blowing up, and taping together, the artist’s work ultimately seeks to “talk back” to the archive and find agency in challenging its images.

Now Rare: $150

[His work] is full of large, ambitious, brilliantly executed mosaics full of so many disparate cultural references, snarling faces and masks and intimations of violence that it can initially be hard to focus.[…] To say that he might have discovered his artistic destiny is putting it mildly.

— Roberta Smith, The New York Times

The inaugural monograph of multidisciplinary artist Cameron Welch presents a vivid, comprehensive look into a young artist’s practice. Welch’s work has straddled sculpture, collage, and textiles, but in early 2017, he shifted to mosaic as his primary medium. As a child, the artist was introduced to mosaic by his grandmother, an experience that has a lasting impact on the way he works the age-old medium to piece together disparate materials and histories. Welch treats mosaic as a physical manifestation of intertextuality, referring to the colliding contexts he unearths in the work as a kind of “infiltration.”

While Welch’s chosen medium evokes ancient traditions, the effect of his work is decidedly contemporary. His chaotic, jumbled compositions speak to the same anxiety felt in the Information Age, an era when unlimited information is available at the tap of a screen. Amidst the pictorial chaos of Welch’s mosaics, the figures who emerge range from familiar to foreign, comical to heroic. Frequently depicting himself and figures from his own life, Welch sheds light on unsung histories within the intricate topology of his creations. An incisive essay by Greek and Roman Art scholar Alexis Belis helps readers contextualize Welch’s work within historical and contemporary creative practice.

Published in conjunction with Tarek Atoui’s 2022 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize exhibitions at The Contemporary Austin and The FLAG Art Foundation, The Whisperers documents the artist’s recent sound-based installations rooted in the idea that sound requires transmission through physical materials and in relation to perceiving bodies. He asks questions such as: What happens to sound as it travels through materials like metal, wood, and water? How can we perceive sound by listening not only with our ears but also with our whole bodies?

Atoui’s research and compositional process is highly collaborative and generates networks of community involvement. He works with other musicians, composers, and instrument makers around the world to develop custom materials he calls “tools for listening,” which conduct and amplify sounds in multisensory ways. In tandem with this process, he invites participation from people where his projects are located, involving musicians and non-musicians alike in creative explorations. In addition to installation documentation, The Whisperers includes interviews with Atoui, texts by the artist, and essays by the curators.

Now RARE — $150

This book accompanies the 2020 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize exhibition, Nicole Eisenman: Sturm und Drang. The exhibition was on view from February 27-November 15, 2020, at The Contemporary Austin on Congress Avenue, with an outdoor sculpture at the museum’s fourteen-acre sculpture park at Laguna Gloria.

A related exhibition of Eisenman’s work with a selection of drawings by Bay Area artist Keith Boadwee, Nicole Eisenman and Keith Boadwee, was on view at The FLAG Art Foundation in New York from December 12, 2020-March 13, 2021.