Given that we are a platform for Art and Ecology, we would like to start sharing with you what it means to be an artist commited to Ecology and other relevant themes. Therefore, we will occasionally use this space to introduce you to artists with whom we collaborate, who have taken part in our projects or who we simply admire.
Our Artist in Focus this time is Tova Katzman – a great ally of Estudio Nuboso. Tova is an artist, photographer and videographer from the coast of Massachusetts, USA, with a BFA from MassArt, Boston. She came to Panama in 2015 to document our first Art and Science LAB and returned in 2017 on a Fulbright grant. She also documented the 2017 LAB and will be photographing the Flash LAB next February.
The photographs and wonderful video that we are posting here are part of her research with the Fulbright grant and were exhibited last year in Panama City. Here is the text that goes with them:
Si Caigo en el Canal, Nada, Nado
Over the last year I have been getting to know an array of complex and sundry characters, their lives all woven into the constructed shores of the Panama Canal.
My open-ended search led me to Brown, a legendary fisherman in Diablo. We sat on the canal edge one morning, waiting for fish to bite when he slipped and fell, toes splashing into the water. His reaction, the title of this series, felt like an unintentional response to the basic questioning that landed me in Panama.
I ventured into this project expecting to find a deep contrast between local existence and a system fabricated to serve global movement. Instead, while documenting my encounters and conversations between the Pacific and the Caribbean, I was affected by how humans and ecosystems have been introduced, rearranged and integrated around the artifice. This work focuses on the blurry line between that which originated here and that which has been designed. I aim to intimately depict a patchwork of perspectives along the edge of a man-made divide. Perhaps it can then be seen from afar, to better understand the result of our geography.
www.tovakatzman.com
