Catalina Bellizzi

Catalina Bellizzi (CATAPHANT) is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator based out of Chicago/San Diego whose various art forms (music, painting, writing, among others) explore the dark but beautiful areas of faith, redemption, and liberation. Ascribing to the Christian faith, her work is an eccentric exploration of what it looks like to embrace the inevitable struggle that living out faith in an inconsistent world entails. Pain, grief, uncertainty, and suffering all become vehicles for the art making process. Bellizzi often makes work about the tension of being a progressive woman within a faith community that still adheres to misogynist and patriarchal paradigm, exploring genuine spiritual encounters as resistance to those oppressive norms. Visually, Bellizzi’s work uses a combination of figurative portraiture with textured shapes and colors that symbolize the disembodied and connected pieces of a spiritual experience.

© Catalina Bellizzi

1. Untitled Landscape – 40 x 30 in.
“The external layers that stand in between us and ourselves.”

2. Veneration of Saint Assimilated – 20 x 24 in.
“A portrait of the isolation achieved when blending with a different culture, of identity contained within a ‘safe’ container of the ideal immigrant.”

3. Suburban Haunted – 24 x 24 in.
“An acknowledgment of the existential dread experienced in overly comfortable suburban settings, a spiritual awareness that the design of your community is rooted in a false sense of superiority. Wanting to rise above a situation in which you have already have encountered an economic advantage, but the meaninglessness created from your advantage leads you to seek meaning elsewhere. Discomfort in the comfortable.”