Artist Stephanie Syjuco was three when her family moved from the Philippines to San Francisco. Growing up, she struggled how to answer people who expected her to know her birthplace. “The truth was that all of my references came from either things I’d read or stories I’d heard,” Syjuco explains by phone from California. “I didn’t have that huge connection I was supposed to have.” In her rough yet intimate photography series, “The Village (Small Encampments)”, she examines the elusive concept of homeland. To create these images, Syjuco explains, she constructed dioramas out of tourist images of the Philippines, placed them throughout her apartment, then re-photographed them as a way to work through personal issues of immigration and identity. “Sometimes I feel like a tourist in my own ethnicity,” she admits. “But I don’t think I’m alone in that sentiment here in America.” (Closed Sun. & Mon.) ERIKA HOBART

April 2-May 2, 2009