BFI and Bridge Initiative in partnership with The Standard invite you to a Pool Panel, on Tuesday, November 12th. Featuring artists with environmentally centered practices, this event will launch Waterproof - a series of site-specific artists’ projects developed in direct response to the environmental issues facing South Florida. Starting this Fall with key projects debuting during the Super Bowl in February 2020, and continuing through 2022, Bas Fisher Invitational (BFI) and Bridge Initiative will illuminate these issues, advocate for change, and present an opportunity for public action through innovative, temporary public art installations around Miami. Float poolside during an evening conversation around the role art will play in shaping discussion around the climate crisis facing South Florida, and join our growing coalition of artists, scientists, educators and citizens coming together to strategize solutions.   

Waterproof is a collaborative endeavor between Bas Fisher Invitational, a 501(c)(3) non-profit known for presenting artists’ site-specific projects at unexpected locations throughout South Florida, and Bridge Initiative, an organization that supports art for environmental advocacy, telling powerful stories that move people from apathy to action. 

Panelists include: Kate Fleming, Naomi Fisher, Colin Foord, Ayesha Singh, and Misael Soto

Naomi Fisher lives and works in New York and Miami. Since graduating summa cum laude with a BFA in Photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art, 1998 her medium has spanned painting, drawing, performance photography, video and site-specific installation, often in collaboration with dancers. Fisher frequently explores this culture clash in her work through the lens of feminist theory and strategies derived from surrealist art. Recently she has started accepting commissions for permanent large-scale public art projects. Since 2004, Fisher has directed BFI (Bas Fisher Invitational), an artist run space dedicated to creativity, experimentation, and discourse in contemporary art.

Kate Fleming had worked in the fashion industry for 15 years before she conceived of Bridge after a pivotal trip to Antarctica in 2015 where she witnessed firsthand the effects of climate change. As a result, she has devised a way to leverage her roots in the worlds of fashion and art to promote her cause. Bridge’s first project was based in Alaska, and brought together large-format photographer David Benjamin Sherry and the Alaska Whale Foundation’s executive director, Dr. Andy Szabo for an eight-day expedition from Sitka to Petersburg where Sherry documented bold, sensual monochromatic landscapes across Alaska that are not safe from environmental changes, such as the LeConte Glacier. The images are currently rolling out as billboards across the United States, with the first one launched October in New York City.

Colin Foord comprises half of Coral Morphologic, an art-science duo formed by Foord and J.D. McKay in 2007 in Miami. Coral Morphologic’s artwork is informed by a scientific mission to document, aquaculture, and protect Miami’s (and the world’s) coral. They hypothesize that the coral pioneering onto the seawalls of Miami may hold the keys to understanding how reef organisms worldwide will adapt to human influence in the 21st century.

Misael Soto was born in Puerto Rico and received their MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018) and graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor's Degree in Art History from Florida Atlantic University (2008). Soto’s oftentimes public work interrogates and subverts contextually associated everyday objects and systemic roles, disrupting and manipulating space, systems, and frameworks. Time-based and ephemeral their work involves interventions made upon existing objects, performative activations, institutional mediations, and is, more often than not, a combination of these elements. Soto is currently the Art in Public Life Resident with the City of Miami Beach and Oolite Arts, and serves as the director to the Department of Reflection a parafictional post-governmental agency.

Ayesha Singh born New Delhi, India, completed her MFA in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018) and BFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK (2013.) She has exhibited her work at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK; Jaipur Sculpture Park, India; ACRE Projects, Chicago; and other space in New Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Chicago, London, Curitiba (Brazil) and Chongqing (China.) Through an interdisciplinary practice that lays emphasis on movement and displacement; Singh questions social hierarchies, political agendas and subconscious value systems placed on ornamentation, design and material in architectural pastiches that construct our cities and homes. Once a building has been ideated, allotted, designed and constructed, what is the experience of the individual, the community and others affected?