32 pages, Singer sewn, 9 x 12” 27 photographs Offset printed on translucent vellum Housed in a reversible, double-hinged cover Designed with Elana Schlenker Studio Spaces Corners, 2024

signed copies Available here

Fever field is the artist-book-as-catalog for Melissa Catanese's immersive installation Fever field (California poppies, hands, seabirds, sun), commissioned by the Carnegie Museum of Art for Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape. Originally presented as an installation of pigment, cyanotype, and carbon prints, the publication translates the work into book form, carrying forward its luminous, ephemeral presence.

In the spring of 2021, during California's driest season in more than a century and amid the devastating loss of life caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Catanese traveled throughout the Bay Area, photographing fragile yet resilient clusters of poppies in places including Briones Hills, Mount Diablo State Park, and Skyline Ridge Open Space Preserve. Combined with anonymous found photographs, these images become a quiet expression of personal and collective mourning while remaining attentive to persistence, beauty, and the hope for regeneration. Both catalog and artist's book, Fever field embodies the work's diaphanous spirit while remaining in dialogue with the darker psychological landscape of Catanese's previous artist’s book, The Lottery. If The Lottery lingered in uncertainty and collective anxiety, Fever field offers not a resolution, but a luminous counterpoint—one rooted in remembrance, endurance, and the possibility of renewal.

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