Stephanie Syjuco. International Orange

Video clip from “In the Gallery with Stephanie Syjuco,” 75th Anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge, KQED, San Francisco, 2012. Video by Matthew Williams and Kristin Farr. © 2012 KQED, Inc.

At Fort Point, located at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Stephanie Syjuco set up a mock gift shop in which every object was saturated in International Orange, the iconic color of the bridge. Stocked with tchotchke souvenir items such as mugs, tote bags, keychains, and matchboxes, the shop celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the bridge and critiqued the financial and social implications of the city’s prosperous international tourist economy. While most souvenir shops traffic in cheap, often disposable items often produced overseas by anonymous and marginalized laborers, Syjuco represented the Golden Gate Bridge with objects made by her and various local craft practitioners, like Heath Ceramics in Sausalito. Through the coproduction of artworks, she examined structures of labor and production within the cultural economy.