Artist Carmen Winant’s large-scale collages and installations illuminate the often-invisible experiences of women, as well as feminist strategies for survival, revolt, and self-determination. She explores these themes through objects drawn from and inspired by the archives of Women in Transition (WIT) and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV).
“I am a photographer who no longer makes her own images. My work revisits and recontextualizes the feminist histories that preceded my own, reaching backward as an attempt to understand the space between our lived experiences, and the larger, if nuanced and sometimes contradictory, aims of women’s liberation. As such the found photographs that run throughout my work – integrated into books, installations, billboards, or discrete objects – are not evidence of a history, but in fact its very living residue. These projects, all of which work to unravel foreclosed histories, often take the form of ad hoc archives and pay particular interest to women’s power, pleasure, labor, and self-actualization. Lately, I’ve turned towards imagination, optimism, and joy as shared, necessary tools of the artist and the revolutionary.”
-Carmen Winant (December 2020)