Fever field by Melissa Catanese

While Pittsburgh-based artist Melissa Catanese was in the throes of her recent work, The Lottery–a photographic reverie on an anxious human civilization suspended between uncertain futures and the aftermath of its distant and recent past, the California poppy emerged as an early motif. She envisioned images she had made of these flowers as figural stand-ins for humans. Mounds. Clusters. Mobs. Populism. False populism. Malaise. This was all before the globe was hit with a pandemic and the meaning began to evolve to include messages of grief, rememberance, and a hope for regeneration. In the spring of 2021, she sought out and collected images of this flower thriving during the driest year in a century in California and during a moment of unimaginable loss of life from the Covid-19 pandemic. In the end, The Lottery book featured only a single black-and-white image of poppies, appearing in the book’s final coda, an elegy, and a sign of cautious optimism.

In Fever field (California poppies, hands, seabirds, sun), 2021, 2023 Catanese loosens the thread of this motif and reimagines it as an immersive and diaphanous wall installation consisting of pigment, cyanotype, and carbon prints to be exhibited in Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art. The artist-book-as-catalog Fever field consists of images from her installation and embodies the ephemeral and luminescent spirit of this work, punctuated with elements from the dark, anxious drama of The Lottery.