Fort Wayne Native Chris Catalogna to Hold Reception for ‘Alignments’ Exhibit

Catalogna’s exhibit features paintings of life’s experiences and finding connections

HUNTINGTON, Ind. — Huntington University will be hosting Fort Wayne native Chris Catalogna for an artist reception on Friday, November 14, to share about his exhibit, “Alignments,” which is currently on display in the Robert E. Wilson Gallery.

Catalogna, a graduated of Indiana University, has built a thriving career as an oil painter and award-winning muralist. His mission as an artist is to place community at the heart of his work to create vibrant art that connects and inspires people.

“I approach my work as a researcher first — drawn to obscure somewhat archaic knowledge, that is usually of no interest to the majority,” Catalogna said in his artist statement. “Each painting begins with something I have stumbled across or has piqued my interest. The act of painting has become a method of inquiry for contemplating and manifesting my fascinations. This show gathers the visual remnants of my investigations. Asking big questions like, what is just a coincidence and when do these things become ‘signs’? Are our lives a series of most likely to occur events or is it somehow guided? When we look at our experiences, it’s extremely hard not to create a coherent narrative out of sequential events which explains the current concept of ourselves. As of recently, I feel this exercise is entirely misleading, and this show was somewhat of an experiment to see if my hunch was pointing in the right direction. Maybe time does not just move in one direction. At the time of writing this statement, I feel like information or events from the future are just as influential as the past is to formulating our present moment.

“I embarked on my journey to answer these questions unaware of what I was uncovering. I stumbled across a collection of Polaroids in an antique mall one day, and I was allured by the idea of finding something to paint by random chance. Whatever stuck out as something that would make for an interesting painting, I took with me. Once I started painting these black and white Polaroids, I’d start making connections to my life that didn’t occur to me when I first picked them out. Even the color schemes I chose for purely aesthetic reasons seemed to corroborate my feelings about the subject matter.

“Some of this could be explained by some subconscious process but it didn’t explain everything. These things called synchronicities were popping up, where two seemingly uncorrelated events appear to be meaningfully related and significantly coincidental. For example, I’d get obsessed with old western country music, and a photo of some cowboys would fall in my lap. In the two weeks preceding this show, shockingly I learned that on my grandmother’s side, they had a mural decal facility that took black and white photographs and colored them into full-scale murals. At what point does it stop being all coincidental? Maybe everything is happening all at once, and we are just experiencing it in the only way we can, one step at a time in the never-ending present moment.”

The reception begins at 4:00 p.m. in the Gallery and runs through 5:30 p.m. “Alignments” will be featured in the Gallery through December 5.