LEARN // Widening the Lens Artists’ Panel
Tuesday, February 25, 2025 | Artists’ Panel @ 6:30 pm
Presented in Whiteman Hall
TICKETS: FREE for Members | $8 for general public
Join us for an artist panel featuring Victoria Sambunaris, Melissa Catanese, and Chanell Stone. Emmy Mickevicius, Norton Family Assistant Curator of Photography, will moderate a conversation about how their work in Widening the Lens engages the exhibition's themes, from land use and its environmental impact to ancestral migration and nature as a memorial landscape.
About Victoria Sambunaris
Victoria Sambunaris photographs the continuing transformation of the American landscape with specific attention to expanding political, technological, and industrial interventions. Her work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Radius Books published her monographs Taxonomy of a Landscape and recently released Transformation of a Landscape. Sambunaris is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York.
About Melissa Catanese
Melissa Catanese 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. 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. She is the author of Dive Dark Dream Slow, Voyagers, and The Lottery, among other artists’ books. Her work was most recently included in Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape at Carnegie Museum of Art. She is the recipient of a Heinz Endowment Creative Development Award and has been shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards and the Foam Paul Huf Award. Catanese contributed texts to Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot (Aperture, 2021), Photographers Looking At Photographs: 75 Pictures from the Pilara Foundation (Pier 24, 2020), The Photographer’s Playbook (Aperture, 2014) and to the project Words Without Pictures (Aperture, 2010), among other publications. Catanese is the co-founder of Spaces Corners, an artist-run project space centered on the photographic book, and she is a professor of photography and drawing at University of Pittsburgh.
About Chanell Stone
Chanell Stone was born in Los Angeles and currently works out of Southern California and Oakland. In her work, Stone integrates the Black body into the American landscape to confront Black erasure in America’s history and contemporary society. Her work demonstrates how crucial it is to acknowledge the significance of Black slaves and Black Americans in the nation’s foundation. Stone’s first solo exhibition, Natura Negra, was held at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, in 2019-2020. Her work has also appeared in various group exhibitions throughout the United States and can be found in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Kadist Foundation in San Francisco and Paris. Her work has been published in the British Journal of Photography (2021), and the CAA Art Journal (2020), among other publications. She has received multiple awards and grants including the Black Studies Project Research Grant (2022), The New York Times, Year in Review: Photo Award (2021), and was a 100 Honoree at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2021). Stone holds a BFA in Photography from the California College of the Arts (2019) and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego (2024).