Melissa Catanese
Melissa Catanese
Compass jellyfish, from the series "Mutations", 2024
Melissa Catanese merges authored and found imagery into fluid, sensorial experiences through collective structure. Drawing on free association, repetition, and rhythm, she re-casts this material into carefully assembled, inconclusive narratives charged with psychic longing, ecological tension, and provocative forms of beauty and violence. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, most recently in Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape at the Carnegie Museum of Art, PA and Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; West Virginia University, Morgantown; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh; Light Work, Syracuse; Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco; the Musée des beaux-arts du Locle, Switzerland; PHMuseum, Bologna; Aperture Foundation, NYC; the 10th Daegu Photo Biennale, South Korea; and the Mulhouse Biennial of Photography, France. Select artist’s books include Fever Field (Spaces Corners, 2024), The Lottery (Witty Books/The Ice Plant, 2023), Voyagers (The Ice Plant, 2018), and Dive Dark Dream Slow (The Ice Plant, 2012). Her work is held in public collections including The Morgan Library & Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Light Work, and the High Museum of Art; and her artist’s books are held in library collections throughout the US. She is a recipient of a Heinz Endowments Investing in Creative Development Award and was shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards and the Foam Paul Huf Award. She has been an artist-in-residence at Light Work in Syracuse and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. She is the founder of Spaces Corners, an artist-run project space and imprint dedicated to the contemporary photobook.