Mindscapes

January 14-February 25, 2006.
Guest writer: Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial Programs, El Museo del Barrio, New York.

Mindscapes featured the recent video, drawing and installation works by Nayda Collazo-Llorens (bo. San Juan, Puerto Rico 1968). Nayda’s multimedia work deals with issues related to themesof communication, tracing, accumulation, defamiliarization and displacement. Ideas and experiences are deployed through a combination of texts, marks, gestures, found objects, images or sounds, that are usually structured in a nonlinear manner. The work invites the viewer to reflect upon the complexities of the mind and language, and furthemore, to engage the fragmented nature of our lives through a process of perceiving and understanding what is inside and around us.

For Mindscapes, Collazo-Llorens worked with a series of elements from her repository creating a complex information system, configured within the physical space using references to notions of the ‘map’ and the ‘territory’.

Nayda lives and works in New York since 2000. She earned an MFA (Studio Arts) from New York University (2002) and graduated from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston with a BFA (Printmaking) in1990. Nayda finished a residence at Location One New York (www.location1.org) in 2006. Nayda’s residency at Location One was supported by New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). Nayda Collazo-Llorens recent exhibitions in 2005 include: Location One, New York; Philosophy Box, New York; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan; Galeria Raices, San Juan; Wahington Square East Galleries, New York; Loop: Video Art Festival ’05 in Barcelona, Spain; and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Strasbourg, France.

Mindscapes by Nayda Collazo-Llorens:
The Poetics of Opposition

The work of Nayda Collazo-Llorens probes the processes of seeing, remembering, and communicating. As she examines how we find our place in space and time, she both links and differentiates these cerebral, yet oftentimes irrational, operations. Her work evokes the vast histories we each carry within, and explores our endless return to formative impressions, even as we process each new moment.

Collazo-Llorens was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. While she currently lives and works in New York, she remains closely affiliated on the Island. Her work has a semi-autobiographical but non-explicit core; thus, simultaneity and displacement are central themes. Fruitfully engaging this recurring poetics of opposition, Collazo-Llorens juxtaposes the pace and weight of the urban metropolis with that of the Caribbean environment. She emphasizes internal and introspective rhythms in marked contrast to the furious pace and crushing magnitude of the external world. Language, a critical element in her works, shifts easily between Spanish and English, and incorporates counterpoints that range from diaristic, poetic snippets to snatches from advertising, signage, or the news.

It is within this rich field of investigation that Nayda Collazo-Llorens creates her newest project, Mindscapes, an installation set within a site-specific wall work, that includes selections from an ongoing suite of drawings, a three-dimensional hanging installation, and three recent works in video. At the entrance to the space, the digital video Infinito (2005, 1:25) sets the tone of Mindscapes. In this mesmerizing, brief loop condensed on a monitor, the multiplying wheels of a bicycle race whir across blacktop. The camera stays pointed on a forward arrow painted on the pavement which the cyclists appear to follow, but the blurry images advance almost in a suspension of time. Finally, they pass, leaving the arrow to remain; after a quiet pause, clapping is heard. The image fades and the caption—“every straight line is the arc of an infinite circle”—evokes the linked and circling trajectories of life.

Entering the galleries, Collazo-Llorens unites the space through a sweeping wall work that begins quite subtly, but becomes a darker, denser presence as one penetrates deeper into the space. This backdrop indicates the artist’s intention that the exhibition be understood as a Gesamtkünstwerk, or total work, in which all the individual pieces of the project relate to and amplify one another. Employing colored tapes and transfer letters, she produces an environmental setting that is both graphic and topographic. Directional lines, numerical symbols and words activate the space and engage the visitor in the unfolding, a situational mapping in which the viewer collaborates in “reading” the physical installation space, which, in some ways, echoes and expands the small fragment of pavement we have just seen in Infinito. Progressions and transformations, graphed lines and angles, meditate on memory just as the durational experience of viewer in the gallery, decoding the wall piece, is an experience of time, physical movement, and of images coalescing and forming meaning in the mind’s eye.[1]

On a monitor set against this diagrammed space, a second digital video, Roaming (2005, 5:18) furthers the viewer’s perceptual exploration of Collazo-Llorens’ world and penetrates into space. Utilizing the camera’s point-of-view, this video take the viewer on a slow climb up and around a unique playground structure. The playset is built from metal poles and red rope joined by S-clips, forming honeycombed, hexagonal shapes. The camera captures the red geometric shapes against a clear blue sky. The images lazily transmogrify from biomorphic, cell-like abstractions into tunnels penetrating deep into the heavens. Blinding sun is inter-cut with images of seagulls stuttering upwards in the sky. A brief glimpse of little girl, climbing far at the top, coupled with the sense of a warm, beach-like setting, creates a mood of nostalgia, of memory. As the camera gradually rotates upward through this system of interconnected linearity, the total environment of the installation, and its allusions to interdependency and structural, organic progressions, is recalled. [1] Collazo-Llorens has, over the past two years, developed related wall works, including Eco, 2004 (transfer with carbon paper on wall, dimensions variable), created on site at the International Print Center New York, for the group exhibition, ¡Impresionante! Innovative Prints by Contemporary Puerto Rican Artists (2004) as well as the environment of her solo exhibition, Configuraciones, Galería Raices, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2005).

While Collazo-Llorens’ iconographies can verge on the abstract or even the mathematical, and her tools are often technological, at heart her work is intimate, natural, and subjective. Organic and earthly subject matter and feeling, as well as nature’s richly mottled and sensual colors, are the cruxes of her artistic language. In the spirit of her dialectical mode of working, there is always an urge to order, to contain the unruliness of nature and life to an arithmetic or progressive series that might contain and control it. Thus, she often utilizes a framework of repetition and variation, and accumulation within a grid of recurrence. After observing the earth, the environment, and then piercing towards the sky, a linear sequence of thirty-five, nine-by-six-inch drawings and a circular installation piece return us to a more intimate, diaristic conceptual space.

An accomplished printmaker, Collazo-Llorens is a sophisticated draftsperson who commands elegant lines and combines color and affixations to powerful effect. She has been producing these personal, visceral drawings on a daily basis over several years. Small but intensely powerful, they are compact expressionistic worlds comfortable simultaneously in the language of the bodily and the schematic. These fluidly elegiac and mysterious drawings—here, a small selection from the vast body of drawings is presented—also contain notes and sketches linked to other works. They are installed in relationship to the ever-more-complex wall work opposite. Travelling deeper within the space, the work Ceremony #2 (2000/2005) hangs from the ceiling. [1] Approximately ten feet in diameter, it is composed from a series of hanging branches that the artist has worked with gesso, notated with graphite and silk screen, and, at times, altered with carved signs or wire attachments. One may circle the periphery of this ritualistic oval, or retreat inside it to meditate on the subtle variety of limb shape and marks.

The last of the three video works is a two-channel video projection-installation, Channels V4 (2004, 4:32) that is the conceptual heart of the project. This work is an ambitious and moving poetic study in all the opposing forces that Collazo-Llorens has previously touched upon. [2] Side-by-side images contrast and synch, offering slices of quotidian imagery made hypnotic through graceful framing and confidently paced editing. Snow falls against the dark winter night while the bright sun blazes across a field of summer-green grass. The drive-by smear of sandy cliffs along a coastal isle road contrast with the swiftly passing images seen through gritty subway windows. The goggle-eyed view one sees, emerging from the waters of an in-ground pool, is opposed to a landing plane’s sweep through the open air, across San Juan’s rooftops, with the sparkling ocean horizon behind. These environments are made sinister through references to mortality: spots of what appear to be blood work or elements from a violent crime scene turn to bright lights, and sickness, paranoia, and love are equally and feverishly alluded to. Again, language plays a central role alongside these images. Stream-of-conscious-style captions and crawls provide glimpses of emotion, while also recording fragments from the barrage of information to which we are subjected daily. Passing thoughts, memories, facts, and feelings spill across this mural-sized, cinematic diptych. Like Collazo-Llorens’ monumental outdoor interventions and her previous, three-channel video installation projections, Channels V4 allows the spectator to experience different registers of time, surging and cascading.[3] Unable to completely grasp the dual sets of text and image projections at once, and perhaps unable to even understand all the texts as they shift between Spanish and English, the viewer thus experiences the images, content, and the structure itself of the poetics of opposition in which Collazo-Llorens traffics. And in this, she successfully submerges the visitor to Mindscapes in her formally and conceptually rich artistic territory.

Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial Programs, El Museo del Barrio, New York, January 2006

[1] The original installation of this work was included in Collazo-Llorens’ solo exhibition, Tiempo+Consequencias, Galería de Arte Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2000).
[2] This work was first presented in Hartford, Connecticut at Real Art Ways in the exhibition, None of the Above: Contemporary Works by Puerto Rican Artists (2004) and in San Juan at Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (2005).
[3] Time (1999) and April 10, 2003 (2003) were both urban interventions, projected outdoors in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on the façade of Galería Raices, in—respectively— its previous and current locations. From the Memories Series: Dream (2000) was a three-channel video installation projection, presented in the group exhibition, Here & There / Aquí y Allá: Six Artists from Puerto Rico, at El Museo del Barrio, New York (2001) and the Blaffer Gallery, the University of Houston, Texas (2002).

On Exactitude in Science

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

J. A. Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658

[Jorge Luis Borges. A Universal History of Infamy (1935), in Collected Fictions (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998), p. 325). Translated by Andrew Hurley.]

The works of Nayda Collazo-Llorens invite us to reflect on our notions of the model of the sign, make us think about relational systems, about arbitrariness, about indexes, about iconic and symbolic modes of representation. The combination of apparently easy marks, texts, gestures, objects, images and sounds in her works goes from the most simple syntax to establishing axes, conceptual relations, sequential relations, spatial relations. The web created by her developed iconography offers a profound insight towards a practice of analyzing structures and systems.

For Mindscapes, Collazo-Llorens worked with a series of elements from her repository creating a complex information system, configured within the physical space of the Space Other gallery. As a viewer, the works of Nayda Collazo-Llorens shown in Mindscapes bring to mind or establish a connection to several concepts that are found in contemporary thought, and to two dear short stories for postmodernity written by master escapist Jorge Luis Borges: On Exactitude in Science (transcribed above), and The Circular Ruins found on The Aleph and Other Stories.

The exhibition begins with the video Infinite / Infinito (2005, 1:25’), which confronts the viewer at the entrance. The viewer either makes a pause before descending into the space of the gallery or is in the position of having to come back to check out or ignore what he or she has missed. This short video sets the tone of what is to come, it is an introduction to the motif of the circle which repeats itself in drawings and in the installation Ceremony #2 / Ceremonia #2 (1999-05), revealing the artist’s concern with sequences and temporality. In Nayda’s work, sequence may not be an order, but establishing a sequence is a requisite and endless process of decoding an object, a mark, a gesture, a sound, an image or a text, a sheer capacity for thought and expression prior to any insertion into a structure.

The video piece titled Roaming (2005, 5:18’) attests to the practice (praxis) of decoding a structure. Decoding this structure within the space of the monitor appears to be an ‘infolding’ of what is going on in the room, the site specific tape-vinyl wall intervention Mindscapes (2006). A multitude of lines arrive and converge, without subordination to chronology, history or linear causation. They proceed by ‘infolding’, and describe not so much a relationship between objects than a transformation, something that happens to a system, reminding us perhaps of the figure of the ‘implex’ of Deleuze and Guattari. [1]

The wall intervention may be seen as a representation of a ‘map’ that proliferates and leads into a ‘territory’, suggesting oppositions or a sort of journey that takes place within the space of the gallery: from light to darkness, from process to experience, from self-consciousness to more obscure and personal psychoanalytical inflections. At the beginning of his Precession of Simulacra, Jean Baudrillard writes about the map of Borges’ On Exactitude in Science, referring to it as an allegory to simulacrum. While Nayda’s appropriation and utilization of concepts and methodologies related to structuralist semiotics may raise the question or refer to the act of tracing and to the ubiquitous fenomenon of simulacrum, I believe her work is most deeply appreciated thinking of the map as a rhizome, or of the rhizome as “a map and not a tracing”. [2]

“To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange new uses.” [3] The tape intervention goes around and beyond the second video, and leads us into the room with the drawing suite titled Numbered Series (2003-2005). As a viewer approaching these drawings, it is helpful to attempt to strip-out all the materialist redundancy from the side of the investigation itself - the assumptions of notions of abstraction, intentionality, subjectivity, interpretability. What remains are assemblies of functionally interconnected coincidental information deposits. The drawings show a progressive complexity as one moves within the space of the room towards darkness.

Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus that “what distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented towards the experimentation in contact with the real”. And it is the reality of looking at a city from above, of looking at places and spaces whose visions blur due to a changing speed and vortex, with which the artist puts us in contact on the two channel video installation Channel V4 (2004, 4:32’). This is a reality of nomadic existence, of displacement, of living in constant movement and turbulence, of changing landscapes and languages. However, it is a textual space that has been tranformed through the development of hyperlinks that activate or promote the occupation of a “smooth space”. While showing a concern with the role of the subject, deep psychoanalytical inflections are revealed on Nayda’s hanging installation Ceremony #2/Ceremonia #2 (1999-05), to me a literal reminder of The Circular Ruins. This is the story about a man who dreams of dreaming the dream of a man, only to be awaken by the thought that he himself is dreamt by another; he is itself another dream. I find that Ceremony #2/Ceremonia #2 (1999-05) is perhaps best understood if one stays away from rational paradigms and dwells into the territory of (?) meaningful dreams, abysmal experiences, and the process of becoming. According to Kinzie, The Circular Ruins is an affirmation of faith in the metaphysical or magical nature of art, but without the salvation such faith customarily guarantees. [4]

Ceremony #2/Ceremonia #2 (1999-05) and the suite of drawings that ensues in the darkness at the end of the gallery best conduct the viewer to a world that “embodies a super-order of superposition rather than arraying an order of substitution”.Attention is in tension, “a hesitant self-definition in suspension. Not an extending out of matter into thought-substitution, nor a doubling of perception by thought: a folding of thought into matter, at a point of indistinguishability with perception. Matter self-perceiving, doubling itself with its variations.” [5]

The territory of Mindscapes may attempt to echo, translate, deconstruct, or decreate a modernist formulation of the notion of the text. I find this vision is somehow connected to those found in the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. These are escapes of infinite artifice, circular and recursive undefined reality.

Gamaliel R. Herrera
Boston, January 2006

NOTES
[1] Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Kinzie, Newman. Prose for Borges. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1972.
[5] Brian Massumi, Event Horizon. From DEAF98 Symposium The Art of the Accident. (http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/node/text/default.xslt/nodenr-70175).