September 10 - October 17, 2008

Lawrimore Project is pleased to announce an exhibition of eighteen 35mm, black and white photographs of the transgender sex workers of Panama City by Arizona artist, Liz Cohen.

Cohen is best known for her recent “Bodywork Series” (2003-2008) in which she transformed not only a car into a lowrider, but also inserted herself into lowrider culture, and transformed herself into a lowrider bikini model. La Cuatro de Julio (2000-2002), although an earlier body of work, explores “bodywork” of a different kind and set the stage for all of her current inquiries.

As the artist explains it: La Cuatro de Julio takes the viewer into the surreal life of transgender sex workers on the fringe of the Panama Canal Zone. Through a series of portraits and landscapes an absurd world is revealed where theater is life, persona masquerades trauma and the photographer adopts the persona of her subjects to describe a place. The transgender bodies are engineered like Panama’s geography and their complicated dynamic as prostitutes resembles the complicated dynamics of Panama’s history.

In 1903, after France’s failure to build a canal, the US manufactured Panama’s birth as a nation and one of the world’s engineering feats, the Panama Canal. Not only was this construction an enormous experiment in poured concrete, it marked the beginning of globalization as we know it today.

Panama is an exaggerated example of extensive diversity as a result of worker migration first from slavery and then for the construction of the canal, an exaggerated example of cultural, moral and human compromises, and an exaggerated example of the movement of goods. Panama has the largest disparity of wealth in the Americas with a free trade zone creating millionaires along side communities of squatters.

La Cuatro de Julio is sequenced after ideas about trauma found in Judith Herman’s groundbreaking Trauma and Recovery. Trauma understood as the aftermath to the event is part truth, part fiction, part performance. Each section of the book, divided by an image of the Miraflores locks, represents a state of opening or closing: 1. The Reenactment 2. Isolation 3. Exhibitionism 4. Solidarity 5. Distance. There is a sense of moving on, but the past remains in the present. Panama cannot shake its history and trauma remains present.

TRANSFORMATION and IDENTITY

The photographs that compose La Cuatro de Julio were produced as the US military made its preparations to turn over their bases and more importantly the canal, to Panamanian control. It is at this time that Panamanians found themselves in a heightened dialogue about their national history, identity and future. The photographs capture the moment of preparation. The actual event isn’t photographed. As the moment of Panama’s independence is never captured, neither is the moment the sex worker takes a “John.” The moment of preparation holds the tension.

This work does not fall into the genre of the socially concerned photographer, nor does it show the photographer as truly part of what she is looking at. La Cuatro de Julio offers a twisted vision of the harsh world of being stuck in in-between-ness, of injury, of preparing for a performance that can only remain theater.

In 2000 La Cuatro de Julio was shown as part of a photo/video installation under the title, CANAL, and from 2000 – 2002 performances were produced in which Cohen took on the persona of her subjects to tell a history. The gallery is pleased to include video documentation of those performances in its BLACK BOX space to coincide with the exhibition of the photographs.

As Liz Cohen’s newest project, Bodywork, is the attempt to turn a German car into an American car, and as the German car tries to assimilate to its new American home the artist attempts to become a part of the California lowriding subculture, it is evident that “Bodywork” continues the questions raised in CANAL about how communities and nation-states define membership and identity and how transformation, in all its forms, is key.

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Stranger

More about the artist’s work