Four Entrances to a Yanira Collado Exhibit
Four Entrances to a Yanira Collado Exhibit is a four part essay on Yanira Collado’s work written by Ernesto Oroza.
Oroza is taking on this text without being able to see the works that Yanira Collado will make for her exhibit at Dimensions Variable. She sent him a photo in which he can see the foundation of a structure at the center of a rural landscape that frames it. He’s tried to respond to that image overflowing with possibility through the first three points of his text. Along with her photo, a paragraph that looks like one of her works was also sent; he understands it as a collage of words: textile, architecture, opacity, hechizo, fragment. She doesn’t want to reveal too much, but he thinks that in offering him those words she’s given his some materials. If he decided to build something out of those word-materials, it would be a ramp or an oblique plane like the kind she makes. Her ramp-like sculpture, shown at the tenth anniversary of Dimensions Variable, and her inclining or reclining works, exemplify what he wants to say. Why the preference for the ramp and the inclined plane? In formal terms, because an object that is totally vertical or flat dulls the visual tension (and tactile tension, Claude Parent would say) that we feel with gravity. An oblique object, on the other hand, can be read as the formulation of that tension.
Ernesto Oroza
Ernesto Oroza is an artist, designer and author based in South Florida. A graduate of Havana’s Superior Institute of Design and later a professor in both Havana and Paris, his practice is geared to highlighting and critically understanding man-object interactions and the role that collective engagements with material culture have in the making of community. He has authored several books on popular creativity as expressed in tool objects and the urban environment–what he theorizes as “technological disobedience” and “architecture of necessity,” respectively. Oroza’s creative practice is grounded in community research, and he develops research methods as well as channels of dissemination that follow the vernacular practices and economic logics of his subject-objects.
Oroza’s recent exhibitions and presentations include “Museo Popular Concreto” at Fredric Snitzer Gallery (Miami), “The Transparent Object” at Mmuseumm (New York City), “Signos 36” at #00Bienal de La Habana (Cuba) and “Efficiency (after Papanek)” at American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora (Miami).