MAUREEN CATBAGAN

Digital Print Triptychs

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.

Lights, Tunnels, Passages, and Shadows 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.

The boxed folio was featured in a solo show at Center for Book Arts in New York City.

Light Tunnels, 2014-15

Digital Prints

The series is a meditation on visibility, invisibility, and meanings of access. Overlooked windows, shafts, elevators, and lobbies of museums and famous architectural buildings transform into sublime openings. 

Passages, 2014-15

Digital Prints

Museum and gallery stairwells transform into metaphysical passageways rather than merely functional components of architecture. 

Shadows, 2014-15

Digital Prints

The shadows of artworks become separate and insistent entities. The negative emerges as an autonomous substance.   

Invisible Sites: Museum Shadows and Passages, 2017

Limited Edition Zine, 2.5 x 11 in. (unfolded)

Matchbook-style folded zine featuring my photograph series of stairwells, passages, and corners of museums. The technique of folding allows for different photo and shape combinations.

Them, 2014-15

Digital Prints

Shot in improvised street-style and digitally transformed, anonymous bodies traverse transitional spaces of airports and museums while daydreaming about their own internal odysseys.  

2010-present

(Currently in post-production)

LIlly Galaxy is a sci-fi dark comedy about identity fractures and cultural subversion. Glam yet gritty, the film is a surrealist take on urban youth angst, viral culture, and queer rebellion. Visually and metaphorically, it explores the notion of identity schisms via the twin as mirror and doppleganger, actors playing multiple selves, and the collision of otherworldly realities.

2007-Present

(Currently in post-production)

Is This Desire? is an experimental anthology that abstractly explores the multi- faceted complexities of queer desire from longing and tenderness, to tension, power plays, and psychological exorcisms via an expansive sensual landscape. 

2007

Video Installation, total running time 10 minutes

A virtual time fissure occurs in Midtown Manhattan, where the past visually runs parallel to the present. Through mirrored life-size projections of sidewalk scenes on the gallery walls shot the week before, the viewers are invited to simultaneously contemplate their presence and absence within the city-scape.

2003-04

Performance and video installation

The ritual of hair brushing is performed by the artist and a participant addressing social relations between tenderness and threat through comforting yet self-conscious exchanges between strangers. 

2003-04

Site-specific installations and performances

A series of absurdist and participatory performances by fairy tale innocents, Dorothy and Alice, that explores the voyeuristic and consumptive disillusions of American pop culture.