Carmen Winant: Unmaking the Picture

Carmen Winant is a photographer who does not author her own pictures. Instead, her work circulates within the world of found and often anonymous camera-made and machine-printed images. Her recent projects include My Birth at the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Another Echo at the Sculpture Center (NY), and Pictures of Women Working at the Columbus Museum of Art (OH); all three installations utilized an explosive, overwhelming, and endlessly modular logic, challenging the manner in which pictorial sequences are read and made neatly legible. As with Winant’s subject—women’s bodies performing and retaliating against sexed expectations—her work consents to more than one meaning, and more than one shade of conflict, to take shape. In this lecture, Winant focuses on the ways in which photography can be used to compel and complicate feminist narratives by asking a series of questions: Is it possible to “picture” liberation? How do violence and submission manifest for the camera? What does pleasure look like? In what ways do pictures consistently fail us? 

Made possible by the Fran and Warren Rupp Contemporary Art Fund

Speaker Bio: Carmen Winant is a writer and visual artist who explores representations of women through collage, mixed media, and installation. She is the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at Ohio State University.