Reading my dad's book: Omaha Bigelow Nov. 15

Voiceover

A public intervention by Nayda Collazo-Llorens
October 25 – November 16, 2008
Viewable from dusk until midnight, Thursdays through Sundays
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 25, 2008, 6PM - 8PM
Artist's talk: Saturday, November 8, 4:30PM

Tribute to Edgardo Vega Yunque: Saturday, November 15, 3PM - 7PM


*Please note that there will be a tribute to Edgardo Vega Yunqué who recently passed away. The homage will take the form of a continuous, non-stop reading of The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow into the Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle, one of the most recent of the accomplished author's 18 novels.




MediaNoche, Manhattan's Uptown gallery devoted to new media, presents Voiceover, a site specific public intervention by Nayda Collazo-Llorens.
A constant flow of text moving across the storefront windows of MediaNoche engages the public to explore aspects of memory, language and displacement. Viewable at night from the street, nearby buildings and passing trains on the overpass, Voiceover is a non-linear textual piece
projected onto the windows of the gallery, located at the Northeast corner of Park Avenue and
102nd Street.

A lyrical, textual composition, Voiceover is based on Collazo-Llorens' research of the archives and oral histories section of PRdream.com, a web site on the history, culture and politics of Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Fragments from these oral histories are combined with texts from public spaces, literature, the media, as well as the artist's own writings.

The projected words become transmitted signals, simultaneously truncated and expanded, pointing to multiple narrators while triggering viewers to connect to their own experience. The ephemeral quality of the projected light and the fleeting texts suggests the fragility and transient nature of memory and story telling.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Nayda Collazo-Llorens was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and is a visual artist based in New York City and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She received an MFA from New York University in 2002 and a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston in 1990. She works in various media, including works on paper and canvas, video, and installations, exploring the way in which the mind processes information.

MediaNoche, a project of PRdream.com
MediaNoche is the place where art, technology and community converge. We offer artists working in new media exhibition space and residencies in order to provoke a dialogue that blurs all lines of marginality and alternity. Unique among arts and technology groups in New York, MediaNoche is directly linked to the oldest Latino community of the city, Spanish Harlem, and has showcased a roster of local and international new media
artists.

TMV

Reply to: I'm trying to see the negative...

That sounds so interesting. I am trying so hard not to see the negative in everything but it just keeps sneaking up on me and biting me in the ass.

Negative

You can hardly tell because I underexposed the photo of In His Footsteps 1 but the tiny negative at about 4 o'clock is from a photo of Tim and me. Tim and I are standing in the kitchen on East 109th Street and I have a stocking on my hand, fingers stretched to make it sheer. It is a photo I used in another piece I made right after Tim died. It was that photo behind a rainy window with the caption "Sometimes I feel like I am a ghost." The weird thing is that one frame of a negative was on the floor of my dad's storage unit when I was there yesterday. I don't know where it even came from.

Insominia: No one can spell at that hour

This is "In His Footsteps 1"

Finally worked on some art

My life is turned upside down. I am back to school and apparently no easier to work with than last year (or maybe that is just how it feels). My apartment is filled with mysterious papers from my dad's files. I am trying to piece together what he did to end up where he did. It seems he saved everything he ever had in his entire life or at least the cord for it. Cords and wires wrapped up in duct tape. Attempts at an effective filing system, abandoned for handy spots to put things, and everywhere amongst bank statements, ideas for writing, phone numbers, or receipts, a few photos were randomly inserted: me, puppet shows, Tim's memorial, his southern girlfriend, contact sheets of his head shots. It is so sad that he could not just behave himself. I feel that way. I just need to exercise some self-control, some discipline but ... I read about organizational strategies, know that I need sleep for my brain to heal, should not buy any more small bags for sorting things, and yet chaos reigns supreme! No I will not give to being a grown-up. Set limits for myself? Bah! But my dad, oh me, oh my, the floor sweeping robot machines are kind of cool. He fell for some stupid, fake debt consolidator company pretending to be a trust that would help him but just took his money. He did not eat the way the doctors told him to for his diabetes. He did not fill his scrips for lancets and he had a blood glucose kit that was a year old that looks totally unused. I have to go to bed. I will take a picture of my art tomorrow. I think I might call the piece "In his footsteps."