North America

Carmen Winant

Hand Study (Making in Whiteness) IIII

2021

Hand Study (Making in Whiteness) IIII, 2021

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Hand Study (Making in Whiteness) IIII by Carmen Winant is part of a series of five collages. For this series, Winant hand cut approximately 3000 images from manuals of craft (mostly pottery) dating from the 1930s-1990s. The artist selected this period of time before the advent of digital photography, when many of the books were handset by artists and artisans, embedded with minor imprecisions and printed affordably. The resulting composition contains images from 15 to 40 different sources, set in uneven columns that appear to collide and jam together. There is a filmic quality to these sequences, showing how the shutter clicks with each movement the potter makes, perhaps recalling early stop-motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge. The close-ups of the depicted hands are of mostly those of white males, who dominate the role of the pedagogue in these manuals. Through an arduous process of setting the images to large sheets of hot-press watercolor paper, Winant aims to “reperform the act of making,” unmaking and remaking. The imperfect grid suggests a human touch, and a tenderness in the process, which contrasts with the pre-digital objective quality of the found images. The vibrant color of the custom wood frame recalls the covers of the instructional manuals from which Winant harvests.

Carmen Winant is one of the leading artists who exclusively uses found images in a photographic practice that takes the form of collages, sculptures, artist books, billboards, and wall installations. Her work expands the public dialogue on the representation of women in Western society. She uses pre-digital sources; hand-cutting images in instructional manuals of craft, childbirth, and utopian pamphlets from lesbian separatists, feminist collectives, and women liberation movements of the 20th century. These images highlight individual and collective acts, and ask: what binds and unbinds one from society? Winant examines and exposes the entrenched ideologies that circulate via these printed images, operating in and shaping the socio-political space that produces them. Using her increasingly public platform to situate herself as an artist who is also a public intellectual, Winant’s work explores the story of women’s liberation, and archival photographs of radical feminist histories that imagine other possible worlds. Winant’s work critically engages with normative depictions of heterosexuality, ‘natural’ births, and the domineering whiteness in the documentation of such imagery. Her practice reflects the racialized space of reproduction, both in birth and in images, addressing critical issues in society and the agency of image-sharing in contemporary life.

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Carmen Winant Hand Study (Making in Whiteness) IIII

Carmen Winant

Hand Study (Making in Whiteness) IIII