Silver Eye

Join us in the gallery where internationally-recognized Pittsburgh artists Melissa Catanese and Ed Panar will speak about their new books, The Lottery and Winter Nights, Walking, respectively. Through Spaces Corners and their individual practices, Melissa and Ed have been generous and strong supporters of the Pittsburgh photo community. Spend the afternoon with Melissa and Ed as they share more about their practice!

Also, don't miss their book signing event at Bottom Feeder Books, 415 Gettysburg, Thursday Dec. 14, 6-8pm, where their work will be exhibited through January 5, 2024.

About The Lottery…

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. (The Lottery was co-published by The Ice Plant (LA) and Witty Books (Turin), 2023)

About Winter Nights, Walking…

In the winter months, our planet slowly drifts towards the furthest reaches of its orbital path around the Sun who exerts just enough gravitational force to coax Earth back around one more time, lest we’re launched outward into the Solar System, starless and adrift. A steady shower of millions of individually designed crystal sculpted snow flakes create a soft temporary encasement enclosing trees, poles, wires, streets, hills and houses inside pillowed layers below. During some of those nights there is a heightened sense of stillness and quiet all around, as if the world itself was placed on mute.

The title Winter Nights, Walking is a reference to a celebrated photography project by the American artist Robert Adams entitled Summer Nights, Walking, which was made in the the city of Denver in the American West. While the project could be seen as a nod to Adams, Panar’s intention for Winter Nights, Walking is to make a Pittsburgh-specific project that highlights the unique qualities of the recent winter seasons in this region, with an eye towards the changing climate and the recent dark winters of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through the motif of wandering the city alone at night, Panar invites viewers to walk with him and consider the familiar space of the city in its uncanny delight. (Winter Nights, Walking was co-published by FW:Books (Amsterdam) and Spaces Corners (Pittsburgh), 2023.)

Participating Artists

1. Melissa Catanese combines 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.

2. Ed Panar is a Pittsburgh based photographer and bookmaker whose interest in photography started in high school as an amateur, photographing his everyday surroundings, friends and acquaintances. Meditating on the contrast between reality and photography has been a source of fascination for him ever since. Being a non-driver, his work is largely focused on exploring the places he’s lived and their immediate surroundings by walking, bicycling, and public transportation. He has published several photobooks including: In the Vicinity (2018), Animals That Saw Me Volume One and Volume Two (2011 and 2016), Salad Days (2012), Same Difference (2010), and Golden Palms (2007). His photographs and books have been exhibited at venues including The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, The Cleveland Museum of Art and at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco. Ed has received The Heinz Endowments Creative Development Award and is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.

3. Founded by Catanese and Panar in 2011, Spaces Corners is an artist’s studio and project space based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The project serves as an experimental platform to engage with contemporary photography, often in book form, and has taken shape as a carefully curated bookshop, exhibitions, presentations and workshops. In 2013, Spaces Corners launched an imprint to further explore their personal work in book form, and to collaborate with other artists, institutions and collections.