PATRON is proud to announce our second solo exhibition with conceptual, photo-based artist Carmen Winant. Manuals for Living brings together two long standing tenants of Winant’s practice: instructional pictures as subject, and studio practice as the site of material transformation and inquiry. Throughout the exhibition, Winant adopts strategies of repetition and reformation to enact strategies of what it means to “practice.”
Since 2018, Winant has been drawing from images originally published in instructional texts published between the 1970s–1990s. Her photo collages, installations, and modular sculptures are developed from cutting and re-assembling images of women and children modeling, or practicing, actions ranging from cooking, childcare, healthcare, to nonverbal language and craft arts. Placed, assembled, and cast in turn, the artworks in the exhibition speak to the politics and poetics of touch.
Manuals for Living–a title drawn from Julio Cortázar’s Instruction Manuals–is grounded in two immersive photocollages wall installations, each composed of hundreds of instructional images cut from texts within the artist’s vast personal collection. All the photographic works in the exhibition are adhered to cyanotyped paper, a vivid and irregular method of photography sometimes referred to as sun-printing. Grouped into horizontal sequences indicating a movement, action, or progressive steps–the images perform the verbs to the viewer. Cyclical Time (Wheel 1) and Side Reel Time (Wheel 2), both arranged in concentric rings of images, eschew the rectilinear methods of storytelling within photography. Here, redeveloping is a type of repetition and return—a formal nod to strategies often utilized by feminist consciousness-raising groups and queer activist groups, for whom non-hierarchical and decentralized modes of arrangement and communication are essential tools.
Titled after lines from American activist writer Marge Piercy, whose poems, framed as questions, challenged the world as it was, Winant’s eight framed collages likewise distill instructional images from their original contexts, aggregating them to create new readings in sum. Bathed in dye and arrayed on a background of cyan, the once black and white photographs are now vibrant, dense, and saturated; by following recipes and the chemical alchemy of these solutions, they are also transformed into near abstractions. For Winant, the cyanotype and dye processes function as a type of camera-less photography, allowing these photographs to be developed anew.
Enacting, not only illustrating the role of making and remaking, Winant posits how touch itself can be a multivalent act: of making, caring, or resisting. Evidenced in dozens of the instruction images: hands braid hair, grip weights, form slippery pottery or loaves of bread, administer medical aid, or tenderly guide a child in dance. Have you cut off your hands yet? installed in the final gallery, is constructed from anatomical photographs of the human hand drawn from a single, instructional book on healing through touch. Titled from a line in Piercy’s The Friend, which acknowledges the agency in the protagonist’s hands as tools in her creative work in the world.
Manuals for Living debuts a series of suspended glass sculptures, cast from the artist’s own hands and fired in dyed glass. In physically moving from visual representations of making to enacting a cast form, Winant’s sculptures model her expansive relationship to the term “practice.” Practice as the repeated actions in acquiring a skill, an approach to thinking and living, and the material outcome of how these movements coalesce. “Hands,” Winant reminds us, “are how we make things, including ourselves.”
CARMEN WINANT (b. 1983, San Francisco, CA, USA) is an artist based in Columbus, OH; her work utilizes installation and collage strategies to examine feminist modes of survival and revolt.
Select exhibitions include: Manuals for Living (2025), PATRON, Chicago, IL; Carmen Winant: My Mother and Eye (2025), Public Art Fund, various cities; The Last Safe Abortion (2025), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE; Makeshift Memorial, Small Revolutions (2024), KADIST, San Francisco, CA; A Brand New End: Survival and It’s Pictures (2024), Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN; Whitney Biennial: Even Better than the Real Thing (2024), The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood (2024), Midlands Art Centre, Arnolfini, UK ; The Mask of Prosperity (2024), Gallery 400, Chicago, IL; Her Voice – Echoes of Chantal Akerman (2023), FOMU, Antwerp; The last safe abortion (2023), Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Open Books (2023), Photo Elysse, Lausanne, Switzerland; The Neighbor, The Friend, The Lover (2023), Dayton Contemporary, Dayton, OH; A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures (2022), The Print Center, New York, NY; Working Thought (2022), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; The Neighbor, The Friend, The Lover (2022), Gävle konstcentrum, Gävle, Sweden; Picturing Motherhood Now (2021), Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Maternar (2021), Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Ciudad de México, México; The Making and Unmaking of the World (2021), PATRON, Chicago, IL; My Birth (2018), Museum of Modern Art, Manhattan, NY; New Visions (2020), The Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media, Oslo, NO; Another Echo (2018), Sculpture Center, Queens, NY; Gray Matters (2017), Wexner Art Center, Columbus, OH; WITCHHUNT (2020), Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, DN; XYZ-SOB-ABC (2019), CONTACT Photography festival,Toronto, CN.
She has been commissioned by The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, PA, The ICA Boston, Boston, MA, and The Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico. Recently published artist books: My Birth and Notes on Fundamental Joy, by SPBH Editions, ITI press, and Printed Matter Inc.
Respectively, her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Photo Elysse, Lausanne, Switzerland; The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Henie Onstad Art Center, Høvikodden, Norway. Recent awards include: Guggenheim Fellow in photography (2019), The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage Grantee (2020) , 2020 FCA Grant recipient in Art (2020) , American Academy of Arts and Letters honoree (2021).
