In Melissa Catanese’s artist’s books and image constellations, she merges her own image-making with found and anonymous objects and reappropriated photographs into a fluid, sensorial experience that pushes the single image beyond its nostalgic surface and openly challenges ideas of authorship, representation, consumption, and the life cycle of images. Her practice celebrates the elasticity of a photograph, where an image is at once an artifact of the past, tied to its descriptive qualities, and an open-ended container of potential meaning. Aligning herself with the surrealist sensibility of radically divorcing an image from its original context, she 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, comforts and disturbs.
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. She pursues her subject matter like a detective, searching for evidence—abandoned visual clues, patterns, and motifs— that become subject for closer investigation and the guiding force for how her story will instinctively unfold. She employs free association and dissonance, repetition and rhythm as primary structural devices to compose psychological, and inconclusive narratives, bridging relationships between the past and the present, between the imaginary and the real.
Catanese is the author of Dive Dark Dream Slow (The Ice Plant, Los Angeles, 2012), Dangerous Women (Spaces Corners, Pittsburgh, 2013), Hells Hollow Fallen Monarch (Spaces Corners, Pittsburgh, 2015), and Voyagers (The Ice Plant, Los Angeles, 2018). Her work has been exhibited in the Mulhouse Biennial of Photography, No Found Photo Fair in Paris, and at venues such as Aperture Foundation in New York, Cleveland Museum of Art, Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco, and Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh. She is currently a full-time lecturer at University of Pittsburgh and visiting faculty at Image Text Ithaca MFA at Ithaca College, Hartford Art School Photography MFA, and International Center for Photography. She is the founder of Spaces Corners, an artist-run photography bookshop and project space located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
CV (.pdf)
melissacatanese@gmail.com
instagram
