Join us in the ICP Café for a signing and reception to celebrate the release of new books from ICP faculty members Melissa Catanese and Ed Panar. There will be a short Q&A followed by a book signing.
Copies of Melissa Catanese's The Lottery (The Ice Plant & Witty Books) and Ed Panar's Winter Nights, Walking (FW:Books & Spaces Corners) will be available for purchase.
This event does not require a ticket to be presented, but RSVP is required.
About The Lottery
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.
About Winter Nights, Walking
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.
About the Authors
Melissa Catanese (b. 1979, Cleveland) combines her own photographs with archival images into a fluid, sensorial experience that pushes the image beyond its nostalgic surface and challenges ideas of authorship, representation, consumption, and the life cycle of images. She is the author of Dive Dark Dream Slow, Dangerous Women, Hells Hollow Fallen Monarch, and Voyagers. Her work has been included in the Mulhouse Biennial of Photography, NoFound Photo Fair in Paris, and at institutions including Light Work, Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Aperture Foundation, MoMA Library and ICP Library in New York.
Ed Panar is a Pittsburgh based photographer and bookmaker whose quietly quirky photographs explore the background and peripheral of the human scene. Drawing from his ever growing archive of photographs, Panar creates groups of images that explore the uncanny nature of the objects and creatures that inhabit this familiar – yet often unnoticed – parallel universe. His photographs and books have been exhibited internationally at venues including: The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Nofound Photofair, Paris, The New York Photography Festival the Cleveland Museum of Art and most recently were on view at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco.
