This site-specific project explores location as an imaginary, physical, geographic, and psychological territory.
This site-specific project explores location as an imaginary, physical, geographic, and psychological territory. The Bermuda Triangle, an area that encompasses the artist’s native Puerto Rico, becomes distended, its coordinates stretched and its area unfolded into her current site. A series of connections, multiple narratives, and factual data are interwoven into a visual structure that explores navigation and displacement.
Nayda Collazo-Llorens, born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, is a visual artist whose work spans drawing, painting, printmaking, installation, video, and public art. Her work combines images, sound, and text to investigate how the mind processes information. While themes of displacement, alienation, and synchronicity permeate her videos and interventions, her text-based works explore post-alphabetic communication, hyperconnectivity and “noise” as systems of information. Collazo-Llorens is the granddaughter of the Puerto Rican literary critic, linguist, and lexicographer, Washington Llorens. Though born and raised in Puerto Rico, she attended college and graduate school in the United States, receiving her BFA in printmaking and graphic design from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1990 and her MFA from New York University in 2002. She has taught at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University School of Art, Kalamazoo College, and held the position of Stuart and Barbara Padnos Distinguished Artist in Residence at Grand Valley State University.