Glam grotesque
Avant-garde jewelry artist and experimental sculptor Michelline Syjuco draws more inspiration from a DVD marathon than from the party-of the-century or the fanciest vacation.
March 9, 2014
Do you remember the movie Terminator, that old 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger flick about the future? Chances are, sculptor and jewelry artist Michelline Syjuco remembers that macabre scene very well, with the last of humanity waging a desperate war against the machines and running for dear life on a carpet of skulls some time in 2029. If she hasn’t seen it yet, we’ll be delighted to invite her to a DVD-Cheetos night. She’d like that very much, thank you.
Unless art beckons, which sometimes has her beating a sculpture to shape on the rooftop or in the backyard at 3 a.m., at the risk of waking up the neighborhood, Michelline is a self-confessed couch potato. Given a choice between the party-of-the-century and a DVD marathon, she’ll quickly change into pajamas and ask for lots of popcorn. “I can’t believe I was the last person who saw the third season of The Game of Thrones!” she gushes.
In fact, make her choose between flying first-class to Amanoi in Vietnam and staying home to watch Sinbad and the Seven Seas on YouTube and Michelline is very likely to choose the latter. “I’m afraid to fly,” she admits, but then there’s her art that takes her places, so chances are, she’ll fly anyway with her heart in her throat.
Since National Artist for Sculpture Napoleon Abueva took note of a sculpture she wore as a bracelet at one of her rare appearances in the social circuit and inspired her to go to town with her wearable art, Michelline’s has been a name to drop in the fashion circles and she has dazzled that world of fleeting trends and fickle tastes with her standout, statement jewelry, but like her work, like her parents, the poet and visual artist Cesare Syjuco and the painter and performance artist Jean Marie Syjuco (all her siblings, sisters Maxine and Beatrix and her two brothers, are also artists or artistic), her name as a brand and the art behind the name have the promise of longevity worthy of a museum. She is an artist, first of all.
And no, all the time cocooned before the TV screen, lost in fantasy worlds or gripped in horror or in awe of the Apocalypse, is no time wasted—it has helped produce the avant-gardiste in Michelline and that’s why her work, many of which crafted from unlikely materials, such as horns and spikes, gears and knobs, and other implements reminiscent of torture chambers, has been making such a statement. In her book, fashion demands some daring. If you must wear art, prepare to shock, prepare to awe, or at least make people stop to think or even start a conversation.
“Oh I love violence in movies,” beams Michelline. “It’s shock therapy. I love fantasy. I remember, our very first Betamax was The Beastmaster. I’ve probably watched it a hundred times I’ve already memorized every line.” When she was about five, she often found herself at her father’s or her mother’s studio. Left to her own devices, sometimes bored out of her wits, as both parents were busy doing their art, she often tinkered with scrap she found around the studio—pieces of wood, screws, bolts, nails—and once created a creature out of them. Impressed, her father urged her to carry on and, thanks maybe to her fascination with the realm of the unearthly, The Beastmaster, Conan: The Barbarian, The Never Ending Story, she had enough resources to build an army.
Fairy tales rocked Michelline’s world, but “as I got older, the dark side of fairy tales intrigued me,” she says. “I loved the ones that started out dark and were eventually revised to be more applicable for children.” Think Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Better yet, think Snow White. “When you think about it, it’s so scary,” explains Michelline. “She died and she was brought back to life. It’s kind of morbid.” All these things, all these elements of fantasy, all these strange, shadowy, grotesque representations of possibility have, along with the creative, push-the-envelope environment in which she was raised, been her aesthetic influence, as well as her tools for creative exploration and experimentation.
For her recent collection “Theater of the Mind,” Michelline drew inspiration from the cult film Dark City, the 1998 neo-noir science fiction starring Rufus Sewell, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, and William Hurt. But nothing in particular in the movie made its way into her collection. What her collection and the film have in common is a mishmash of alternate realities, dreams mingling with fears, facts meeting fantasy, all seemingly random yet well-curated collection of things that grip the senses, tickle the imagination, provoke the sensibilities. “I’m really drawn to fantasy. I like other worlds,” explains Michelline. “I like mixing eras. I don’t like everything so ordinary. Dark City is about these people living in this city where there’s never any sunlight. Everything in the city was created based on their memories and things in their minds, so it is a combination of elements. They have cars from the 1950s and some people are dressed in 1960s attire. It’s a melting pot of all their memories. ‘Theater of the Mind’ is something like that. You can’t really put your finger on it. It’s nothing really specific. It’s a mixture of everything.”
Growing up in a family of artists, Michelline has it in her DNA to live life in pursuit of great art, but even in the day-to-day company of these artists, she has been able to develop her own style, to see everything from eyes distinctly her own. She can’t be grateful enough that her parents let her find her own point of view. Her mother, for instance, never interfered with her creative impulses, although when the mood eludes the daughter, the mother is always there to push her on or at least, to remind her not to give it up.
“As kids, we attended workshops with my parents at Art Lab. It was then in EDSA,” Michelline recalls. “They used to hold workshops for young artists. I just picked up a lot of things from there. My parents don’t handle metal but it’s something I found interesting and so that’s where I’ve gone.”
Today, Michelline has her own showroom at ArtLab, which her family has since last year transported to a quieter, tree-lined street inside an exclusive village in Alabang and there it is, heralded by the shadow of a woman in distress on the wall, without the woman who casts the shadow, a portal into that fantastic world inside Michelline’s head.
Like the pensieve in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, where one can view memories from a non-participant, third-person point of view, Michelline’s work draws her audience to the inner workings of her mind that aren’t easily revealed even when she is at her most candid, even in her most unguarded moments. But in her work, these pieces of memory, these glimpses of possible futures, these imagined realities come to the fore and, from outside looking in, we are drawn to Michelline’s world over and over again.
The catch is, as the universe is a dark infinity lit up only by heavenly bodies, by celestial beings, by divine explosions, by stars, we never know what she might come up with next.
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