Block Out the Sun (2019) emerged from the artist Stephanie Syjuco’s research into the local archives of St Louis, Missouri, as part of her solo exhibition Rogue States held at the Contemporary Art Museum St Louis. Here, she worked with documentations of a Filipino village that was staged in the 1904 World’s Fair, with over 1,200 “natives” imported to dance and provide entertainment for the fair. The Philippines was featured as a newly acquired colony of the United States. Intervening into these images, the artist covered over the faces and identities of those captured. This is not so much to protect their exposure from the colonial gaze of the camera, but rather to thwart the contemporary viewer’s consumption of these images and the inequalities that they reproduce. Through the documentation of the artist’s own hands, the work also registers the artist’s presence as part of this continuing legacy, especially in her own lived experience of being Filipino-American.
