Exhibitions
MELISSA CATANESE: THE LOTTERY
Tri-Star Arts / 4450 Candora Ave., Candoro Marble Building December 1, 2023 - December 1, 2023
Melissa Catanese
Tri-Star Arts is pleased to present Melissa Catanese: The Lottery, curated / organized by Mauro Antonio Barreto in the carriage house of the historic Candoro Marble Building on Friday, December 1, 2023 from 5:00—8:00 pm (curator in attendance).
In Catanese’s recent monograph The Lottery (The Ice Plant & Witty Books, 2023), the artist combines her personal photographs with anonymous vernacular photos, press images, and NASA archival imagery, to create a disquieting psychic journey that echoes the fear, anxiety, group think, tribalism, that define certain sectors of contemporary life.
For this one-night exhibition, Catanese has reimagined her source material into a sequence made specifically for the slide projector—echoing her process of ordering and juxtaposition—where photographs overlap, collide, fuse meanings, and speak as a singular, mounting, staccato voice.
Melissa Catanese is the author of The Lottery (The Ice Plant & Witty Books, 2023), Voyagers (The Ice Plant, 2018), Dive Dark Dream Slow (The Ice Plant, 2012), Hells Hollow Fallen Monarch (Spaces Corners, 2015), and Dangerous Women (Spaces Corners, 2013). 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 professor at University of Pittsburgh and visiting faculty at Hartford Art School Photography MFA and International Center for Photography. She is the founder of Spaces Corners, an artist-run project space located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Mauro Antonio Barreto is a photographer and curator based in Nashville, Tennessee. He has presented his work in solo exhibitions at The Java Project (Brooklyn, NY), Random Sample (Nashville, TN), Spellerberg Projects (Lockhart, TX), the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and the San Angelo Museum of Fine Art (San Angelo, TX.) He earned an MFA in photography from the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford, and teaches at Lipscomb University and Middle Tennessee State University.
Tri-Star Arts exhibitions are open to the public regularly from Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 am until 5:00 pm, alongside iconic spaces within the Candoro Marble Building (located in the Vestal neighborhood of Knoxville).
Tri-Star Arts is based at the Candoro Marble Building with its main office, gallery space, and artist studios. Their gallery features exhibitions with a local, state-wide, and national focus on contemporary visual art.
Constructed in 1923, the Candoro Marble Building originally served as the offices and showroom for the Candoro Marble Company. It showcases a Charles Barber-designed Beaux-Arts architectural style, beautiful Tennessee pink marble, and an iconic tree-lined drive on its one-acre grounds. In early 2021, the Aslan Foundation completed a substantial restoration of the building. In partnership with the Aslan Foundation, Tri-Star Arts oversees programming at the site. It is located at 4450 Candora Avenue, Knoxville, TN 37920.
About Tri-Star Arts:
Tri-Star Arts serves Tennessee by cultivating and spotlighting the contemporary visual art scenes in each region while fostering a unified state-wide art scene. Tri-Star Arts programs promote art dialogue between the different cities in the state, and between the state and the nation.
Tri-Star Arts initiatives include a gallery space and artist studios at the historic Candoro Marble Building, Current Art Fund grants, 2023 Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art, state-wide exhibition projects and speaker series, and LocateArts.org web resource.
