Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Carmen Winant
American; 21st-century
Chicago, IL: Patron Gallery (Exhibition: Carmen Winant: Manuals for Living)
81%
Cyclical time (Wheel 1). 2025. Found images mounted on paper, mounted to board
It's perhaps too obvious to invoke Muybridge, but I'm not sure how better to describe what's good about this piece than by saying that it's as if Winant has activated with it all the beauty that's latent in Muybridge's old motion studies. (Given their scientific purpose, Muybridge's studies are only ever indirectly, limitedly beautiful.) Winant is by no means the first artist to draw on Muybridge's sequential photography. The Conceptualists (LeWitt, Nauman) invoked his work for what it suggested about the gulf between events and objects, between things alone and things in sequence. Winant, however, seems to have a predominantly "formal" affinity for the old protocinematographer; her mandala uses the raw visual stuff of his mode of photography — its registration of bold static swaths amid movement; its delight in small variation — as a point of departure. The parts find themselves expressed in the effect of the whole: it seems to contain both motion and stillness simultaneously; it is somehow both infinitely diverse (look at the shocks of color here and there!) and unified at once. (TFS, 2025)
Chicago, IL: Patron Gallery (Exhibition: Carmen Winant: Manuals for Living)
58%
What is it we turn from, what is it we fear? 2025. Found images mounted on paper, food coloring
The found images are distaff and old-timey, which implies the artwork's feminist political intent and its theme of domestic labor. The use of food coloring (something I associate almost exclusively with my grandma's kitchen) emphasizes this. It's to the artwork's credit, however, that both Winant's selection of images and her title are ambiguous rather than politically prescriptive. The ideology that's at play seems more like the artist's modus operandi than it does a didactic imperative of the piece; this is aesthetically beneficial. The collage, in other words, is a transcription of Winant's feelings about women's work in the 20th century — it's feminist poetry — rather than a broadside. This comes through in the inexplicability of many of its image-sequences (the fifth row's stunning purplish gazer gazing at... a dog trainer?), as well as in the way some of its images have been substantially obscured by the dye (the third picture from left in the fourth row, for instance). The irregular sizes of the found photographs, as well as the uneven border around the whole ensemble, likewise contributes to the piece's general open-endedness. Some problems: the use of food dye rather than another method of coloration is a conceptual flourish that puts the piece a step closer to didacticism than it needs to be; while some of the individual photos (especially the most effaced ones) benefit from the coloration, the presence of added color throughout the whole piece distracts somewhat from the sequencing of images, which is the main attraction; while certain discrete image-passages display a unity of theme and/or physical structure, there's a lack of focus to the entire arrangement that has the piece overall verging on craftiness. (TFS, 2025)