Yanira Collado

Residual Elements/Meditaciones sobre lo Fragmentado
03.20–04.26.2025
Room 1

Residual Elements/Meditaciones sobre lo Fragmentado calls forth the spiritual qualities in reclaimed objects. Artist Yanira Collado chronicles diasporic histories by refashioning items like textiles, paper, cardboard, paint, oil pastels, wood, and soap. In the process, the artist expands a universe of meaning that spans the Caribbean and the southern United States.

Communities-in-movement acclimate to a new place despite maintaining roots in another land, yielding the debris of diasporic encounter. What is conserved? What is reconstituted? What is lost along the way? Scholar Brent Hayes Edwards refers to “orchestrated fragments”: pieces of the past that, when laid out together, produce loose patterns. The (sacred, sacrilegious) geometries Collado reads reconcile the material and the spiritual. The untidiness of discarded materials converges with the tidiness of geometric patterns to fray form and its attendant assumptions.

Rooted in historical rhythms of diasporic movement, the artist orchestrates choreographies of resistance. Anchored in native Taino traditions, the project preserves threads long thought to be lost. Indeed, another type of transcendent refashioning awaits. Residual Elements/Meditaciones sobre lo Fragmentado is an invitation to consider how the embodied, the material, and the spiritual coalesce into an exploration of what diasporic communities know.

— Eilin R. Pérez