Continuation - A Tribute to Colin Chase

Colin Chase was my advisor and close mentor. My encounter with him was the main reason why I chose City College to pursue my MFA degree. Continuation, a tribute exhibition honoring him, is on display at CCNY Compton-Goethals Gallery from April 14-May 4, with an opening reception on Thursday, April 20, 5-9pm.

This image that I made titled Allegory of the Cave is dedicated to him. Colin prompted me to perceive objects through its many layers of relations; not only its materiality but also the intangible shadows connected to it. Not only its historicity but also what is sensed and unsaid. It made me think about how dark matter is unseen and yet holds all that is seen in the universe. How a shadow in Plato’s cave can be both an illusion and a revelation.

After Image - Sensing Brownness

Amber Jamilla Musser writes about my Dark Matter photography series for her essay Sensing Brownness: On Racialization, Perception, and Method. She states that “visibility comes down to a question of valuation. In this way, Catbagan reminds us that our experience of art, museums, and even knowledge production more broadly is framed by work, people, and spaces that are often marginalized.” Her article is featured in the March 2022 issue of After Image.

Brooklyn Rail - Art Books Review

Amber Jamilla Musser reviews all three shows at the Center for Book Arts Spring 2021 exhibition including my show Lights, Tunnels, Passages, and Shadows. She connects them as manifesting “theorist Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis and use the forms of the book to enlarge what constitutes knowledge and being together.” The review is featured in the June issue of the Brooklyn Rail.

Lights, Tunnels, Passages & Shadows - Center for Book Arts

Lights, Tunnels, Passages, and Shadows exhibition examines the transcendent possibilities of peripheral spaces within museums. A utilitarian passage transforms into an ethereal opening. A mundane corner vibrates with a change of light. An invisible worker’s movement conveys visual poetry. Stairwells become illuminated, meaningful, and spiritual. Shifting the visual paradigm of these spaces, objects, and people changes their meaning and the viewers’ relation to them.

The photographic series is featured in a boxed folio containing three fold-outs that enable the images to be arranged into multiple compositions creating abstract narratives that connect the peripheral to the sublime while focusing on the museum worker as mediator. These re-configured fold-outs act as architectural interventions illustrating that while the marginal is designated towards boundaries, it can also be the edge towards boundlessness.

Feature in Art Blog

My photography series “Dark Matter” was featured in Artblog’s ongoing virtual exhibition “Artists in the Time of the Coronavirus.” Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof launched Artblog in 2003 with a mission to share their intimate knowledge of Philadelphia's cutting edge art, and to educate and support a community of artists, art lovers, gallerists, critics and academics. Artblog was recognized for excellence twice by Art in America (2005, 2007) and has received grants from the Knight Foundation and elsewhere. Working as a team of writers and support staff, Artblog today is an educational laboratory and online archive generating ideas to connect the public with art.

The unseen that holds all that is seen

Dark Matter - doorway, art object shadow, guard’s foot (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

This series is a meditation on the question of representation and the perceptual conditions that enable us to see not only art, but also multiple forms of difference. I photograph staircases, ceilings, passageways, and guards within museums, essential components that are seldom considered. They occupy a complicated relationship to functionality and value, much like the conditions of labor within capital. These triptychs center and translate peripheral bodies and spaces into alternate forms of possibility and agency by activating strategies of temporal looping, listening, and shadow work. I approach representation through sensation, in order to perceive the fullness of what is absent within the Western frame. These aesthetic disruptions shift dominant paradigms of objectification and labor to produce radical reorientations.