Melissa Catanese: Artist Talk

Abstract

Melissa Catanese plays with images as raw material, intuitively teasing out oblique and guttural interpretations, tapping the inexplicable and often dormant space within the surface of a photograph where meaning extends and recedes. Intentionally ambiguous, fractured, and strange, her subject matter gestures toward alienation as the dominant feature of modern society and is re-cast into carefully assembled sequences that sparkle with deep psychic longing, apocalyptic comedy, and provocative forms of beauty and violence. In her upcoming artist talk, Melissa Catanese will delve into her deep, evolving relationship with photography and images, tracing the biographical roots that have shaped her creative practice. She will offer insights into the thought processes behind her work, exploring how intuition, memory, and personal experience inform her approach to image-making and sequencing. Highlighting her most recent monograph, The Lottery, Catanese will discuss the inspirations, materials, and events that have guided its creation.

Biography

Melissa Catanese creates artist's books and image constellations that merge her own photographs with found and anonymous imagery, transforming individual images into fluid, sensorial experiences within a collective context and challenging ideas of authorship, representation, and the lifecycle of images. She is the author of Dive Dark Dream Slow, Voyagers, and The Lottery, among other books. Her work was most recently included in Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape at Carnegie Museum of Art. She is the recipient of a Heinz Endowment Creative Development Award and has been shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards and the Foam Paul Huf Award. Catanese contributed texts to Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot (Aperture, 2021), Photographers Looking At Photographs: 75 Pictures from the Pilara Foundation (Pier 24, 2020), The Photographer's Playbook (Aperture, 2014) and to the project Words Without Pictures (Aperture, 2010), among other publications. Catanese is the cofounder of Spaces Corners, an artist-run project space centered on the photographic book, and is a professor of studio arts at the University of Pittsburgh.