The Lottery  
80 pages, Hardcover
9.5” x 6.5”, 66 photographs
The Ice Plant & Witty Books, May 2023

Signed copies also available here and here

Shipping end of June

$38 + shipping

A wild, insomniac cousin to her somnambulist classic Dive Dark Dream Slow (The Ice Plant, 2012), Melissa Catanese's The Lottery reads like a work of speculative fiction: a glimpse into an anxious human civilization suspended between uncertain futures and the aftermath of its distant and recent past. Seamlessly combining her own recent photographs with anonymous vernacular photos, press images, and NASA archival imagery, Catanese's intuitive editing re-animates the images' dormant surfaces, evoking the mob mentality and tribalism of Shirley Jackson's short story “The Lottery” as well as the cosmic indeterminacy at the heart of our unfolding present. Throughout the sequence, we see catastrophic forces and events punctuated by archetypal scenes of serenity, tenderness, and fragility. Crowds gather to gawk, passively entertained by unseen horrors. Lone figures claw, swim and bend, haunted and creaturely, isolated and immersed in primordial landscapes. Brief fragments of text from Virginia Woolf hint at a tentative meaning to the madness, a glimmer of hope for regeneration.

Special edition

The Lottery special edition includes a copy of the book and a separate risograph print folio. The folio is screen-printed and contains nine individual risograph prints.The reverse side of each print comes together to form one large tiled print.

9.5 inches x 6.5 inches
Printing and production by theretherenow.
Graphic design by Giulia Boccarossa
edition of 50

$150 + shipping


Light Work Print edition 

Printed by the artist on the occasion of the Spring 2023 release of the artist’s book. The print edition comes with a copy of the book + a print

Print specifications:

California poppy field #2, May 2021
13x19 inches
Pigment print on Japanese washi, hand-coated in beeswax

$250 + shipping

Available here through Light Work