EMERSON DORSCH ANNOUNCES REPRESENTATION OF YANIRA COLLADO
The artist experiments in her work with the reconfiguration of objects that speak metaphorically about time.
Yanira Collado (1975, Brooklyn, New York) identifies as a Dominican born in New York. Since she was a child, she lived in different communities: Brooklyn, where she was born, Dominican Republic and Miami, where her mother worked to become a tailor.
The artist's ouvre proposes an awareness of visual language as well as a meditation on identity. This is seen through multiple layers of textiles and construction materials that shape the canvas. From the surface, Collado extracts the inherent metaphors in each one. Each chosen material implies a story, a geography, a life.
“My work attempts to assemble a visual language that reconciles the process in which the history of this information is recorded, stored, and retrieved. I am interested in the labor inherent in these materials and the shapes taken during their transitions, which conjure up invocations, ritual, a transcendence of presence, and in many ways, fragments becoming whole.” - Yanira Collado
Some of her pieces resemble relics and wall pieces that once served other duties. In Western history the walls were the canvases of graffiti artists, the supports of buildings, the protest sheet of revolutionaries and the dividing walls of border communities.
What Collado have achieved is a conception of the records of previous civilizations, the traces that one can find in the ruins and the meaning of each symbol for popular memory. Beyond the materials, shapes and patterns, what she exposes in these overlapping layers are the multiple records of history. With the help of meticulous detail that allows her to capture the essences of different societies, she provides the viewer with the stored information in order to recover it.
If history had a face, we would see a large part of it through Collado's work.
