Nayda Collazo-Llorens. Dis/connect

LMAKprojects is pleased to present Dis/connect, Nayda Collazo-Llorens’ fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The works in this exhibition evidence the artist’s ongoing interest in how our minds process information, specifically dealing with concepts of navigation and noise. Dis/connect examines connectedness and disconnection as simultaneous conditions, whether referring to memories, language, displacement, location, communication or media. The works in this exhibition function as conceptual and formal explorations of our contemporary condition, as we engage in fluid, elastic and often paradoxical navigation between multiple states of being.

The exhibition includes a new wall installation titled Geo Dis/connect, consisting of 360 framed images of found maps that have been trimmed and combined with solid colored areas. The work’s grid format, geographic references and color bands suggest a level of interconnectedness as much as fragmentation and disruption. Also included in the exhibit are works on canvas from the Locus Rackets Hypnotic series, which echo similar ideas. New York based critic Kathleen MacQueen wrote in BOMB Daily about the artist’s process and work: “Her own practice of daily drawings—visual communication in a nonverbal accumulation of signs, symbols, marks, and traces of passing experience and awareness—now coalesces in paintings that pulse with a myriad of connotations, including webs, weather charts, echograms, geological topography, and mazes.”1

Nayda Collazo-Llorens, born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, is engaged in a multidisciplinary practice examining the way in which we perceive the world around us. She recently completed Stranger Land, a site-specific textual intervention at Kalamazoo College’s new Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership building, designed by Studio Gang Architects. Other projects include the ongoing Postcards from Puerto Rico, a series of interventions in which postcards are shop-dropped in tourist stores in Old San Juan, which began in 2014 with La piña está bien agria (the pineapple is very sour)—a Puerto Rican idiomatic expression that points to tough economic times. Previous projects include Pleasure, Fear & the Pursuit of Happiness, a public intervention at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden commissioned by the Bass Museum of Art (2013), and Reverb, a multi-channel video installation at Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City (2012). Her work has been exhibited at the 10th Havana Biennial in Cuba, the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, and at El Museo del Barrio in New York City. Her work was recently included in the language art anthology The Dark Would, edited by Philip Davenport and published by Apple Pie in the UK. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artnet, Art Nexus, Art News, BOMB Daily, and NEWCITY, among others. Collazo- Llorens received an MFA from New York University in 2002, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship in 2012.