Fever field (California poppies, hands, seabirds, sun), 2021, 2023
Pigment, carbon and cyanotype prints on hand-waxed washi paper
Carnegie Museum of Art, Heinz Galleries
May 11, 2024–Jan. 12, 2025

Catanese began this work in Northern California in the spring of 2021, the driest season in over a century, and during a moment of unimaginable loss of life from the Covid-19 pandemic. She visited Bay Area locales including Briones Hills, Mount Diablo State Park, and Skyline Ridge Open Space Preserve, to seek out and collect images of these fragile, yet hardy clusters of California poppies thriving amidst a drought and what seemed like society’s darkest hours. The creation of this work, combining her own photographs with anonymous ones, is an expression of personal and collective grief, an act of remembrance, and a symbol of resilience for an uncertain future to come.

Fever field (California poppies, hands, seabirds, sun) is included in Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape, a multi-faceted examination of contemporary ecological issues as they intersect with racial, economic and political life. Featuring nearly 100 works by 19 different artists with multiple museum premieres and new commissions, this exhibition invites you to reconsider your relationship to the environment and understand how photography helps envision alternative paths forward.