From the Memories Series: Dream (selected frames), 2000

From the Memories Series: Dream, 2000

Three-part video projection with sound

Nayda Collazo-Llorens, a painter and installation artist, is an accomplished printmaker. Since 1999, she has presented digital and video projections. Through her background in graphics, Collazo-Llorens has acquired a sophisticated understanding of the impact of repetition, variation, layering, and sequencing. Her newest work, From the Memories Series: Dream (2000), takes her deep into the heart of the psychoanalytical interests specific to video. With an intimate, reflective and emotional point of view, she examines inner rhythms and the experience of time.

From the Memories Series: Dream (selected frames), 2000

By using distortions of time, Collazo-Llorens presents a dream experience. Two countdown timers run in the upper right corners of each projection. One timer runs at a normal pace; one runs very rapidly. The two different speeds indicate different registers of time: the normal time of daily life, versus that of dreams–an altered state of anxiety, fear, or anguish. The quiet beat of the changing text creates yet another, inevitable timing counterpoint against which the chronometers in the video images work. A spectator must choose between watching the images or reading.

The narrator in the text relates witnessing a bloody, but unspecified, tragedy. She recalls not being able to speak or scream. She controls her rising hysteria by counting, or with dictionary definitions that provide a rational counterpoint to her panic. Coupled with the soundtrack of waves hitting a shoreline, her description of frustrated, choked speech creates an oppressive atmosphere of drowning. Projected one line at a time in a rhythmic beat, the poem moves almost too fast to be read. The constant switching back and forth between languages–perhaps a reflection of the artist’s bilingual thought process in New York–adds to the sense of expression being thwarted.

Dream is a muralized video projection that surrounds the viewer. Thus, the spectator always loses some of the image or text. While enveloping the viewer with the emotional and evocative clarity of the dream world, the structure of the work–with the logic of dreams–also withholds. Unable to grasp the dual sets of text and image projections at once, and perhaps unable to even understand all the text, as it shifts between Spanish and English, Dream turns the beholder back and forth, leaving them in a state of perpetual frustration which mirrors both the content and psychoanalytical underpinnings of this work. –DC

Nayda Collazo-Llorens (b. San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1968) is currently a candidate in the Masters of Fine Art Program, New York University (New York, NY) She holds a Bachelors’ degree in printmaking from the Massachusetts College of Art (Boston, MA).

Major individual exhibitions include Tiempo + Consecuencias, held at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón (Santurce, Puerto Rico, 2000), Time, an outdoor video screening (San Juan, PR, 1999) and Arbo-less, at Galeria Raíces, (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1997).

Notable recent group exhibitons have included the Printmaking Biennial, Museo Nacional de Grabado (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2000), IV National Fine Arts Competition, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Santurce, PR, 2000), the Bienal de Arte Joven, Museo de Arte de Ponce (Ponce, PR, 1999), and Art of the New Medium: Twelve Electronic Proposals, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Santurce, PR, 1999).