STATIC | GESTURE | SYNTAX

An Archaeology of Arts

Artist Profile

Yecid Ortega is a Neurodivergent multidisciplinary artist and cultural archaeologist whose work represents the emergence of a singular voice from a lifelong engagement with the raw materials of expression. For over three decades, Ortega has worked in the interstitial spaces between sound, text, and image, amassing a vast and eclectic body of work that only now coalesces into a public-facing practice. At age 50, his emergence is not a beginning, but a synthesis, the point where plural frequencies align into a coherent signal.

ARTISTIC PRACTICE

Ortega’s work is an ongoing excavation of the poetry inherent in distortion, the artifacts of communication, and the beauty of the unfinished. He treats noise, whether sonic, visual, or textual, not as interference, but as a primary source of meaning. His practice can be understood as a series of interconnected explorations:

Literary Arts & The Poetic Voice: Rooted in the 1990s-2000s underground literary scene in Colombia and the USA, Ortega's foundational work in poetry and spoken word explores the rhythm and physicality of language. His spoken word performances, available through his Bandcamp, are visceral and incantatory, laying the groundwork for his later sonic experiments.
Art Brut & The Unmediated Gesture: Parallel to his literary work, Ortega developed some practice in the spirit of Art Brut. His experimental, splatter, and doodle art from the 1990s-2000s is a testament to an intuitive and unconstrained creative drive. This work celebrates the impulsive mark, the accidental form, and the energy of raw, untaught gesture as an outlet or space of his Neurodivergent mind.
Sonic Landscapes & Cultural Production: From the curated frequencies of his Hybrid Frequency noise project to the intimate documentations of his field recordings, Ortega constructs complex sonic environments. This deep engagement with sound was amplified through his 15-year tenure as the cultural producer of Ruido Latino, a platform dedicated to amplifying underrepresented voices in the audio-visual arena.
Glitch Art & The Aesthetics of Error: Ortega’s most recent work in glitch art, under the moniker Signal Noise, is a logical culmination of his obsessions. Here, he manipulates digital and analog signals to reveal the hidden architectures and poignant failures of our technological systems, finding profound beauty in the corrupted data stream.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My art is the artifact of my neurodivergent mind navigating a world of overwhelming signals. For decades, I didn't just listen to the static; I was the static, a mind alive to frequencies others filtered out. My work in glitch, noise, and field recording is how I map that internal experience. It is not a chosen aesthetic; it is a recorded reality.

The gesture, the physical mark of paint, the rhythm of a spoken word, is my act of grounding. It is how I tether that torrent of data to a human scale, creating a new syntax from the dissonance. Painting is an act of focus; the splatter is a release of cognitive pressure.

I also engage in an act of translation, a search for a new syntax. A glitch is frozen and framed, becoming a visual poem. A field recording is layered and bent, becoming a dissonant score. A blacked-out page of text is a gesture of reduction, revealing a new narrative in the negative space.

Age has not slowed this process; it has clarified it. With time comes the quiet confidence to stop explaining and simply present the evidence of a life lived in a different key. This work is the result of 50 years of learning to trust my own perception. I am not emerging as a novice, but arriving as an integrated self, offering a lifetime's worth of data on the beauty and chaos of a differently wired mind. This work is not about finding a clear channel, but about proving that the most profound communications occur in the gaps, the errors, and the beautiful, static-filled space between

SELECTED PROJECTS & ARCHIVES