CARMEN WINANT: Who Says Pain is Erotic?
The title of the exhibition, Who Says Pain is Erotic?, is taken from images of feminists holding protest signs. For this exhibition, Carmen explores ideas of healing and touch, a process the artist started by finding images that depicted violence and tenderness at once, and from this she started to look towards images of healing, compelled by the idea that something so enormously internal could be depicted in an outward way. Carmen wants to show us how self-healing might work and, more importantly, look.
Fortnight Institute is pleased to present Carmen Winant's first solo exhibition in New York, entitled Who Says Pain is Erotic?. The exhibition will be on view from Saturday, April 16th through Friday, May 13th.
The title of the exhibition, Who Says Pain is Erotic?, is taken from images of feminists holding protest signs. For this exhibition, Carmen explores ideas of healing and touch, a process the artist started by finding images that depicted violence and tenderness at once, and from this she started to look towards images of healing, compelled by the idea that something so enormously internal could be depicted in an outward way. Carmen wants to show us how self-healing might work and, more importantly, look.
Carmen has long collected images of women, driven by the hope that their aggregate will help her understand something about female authorship, impulse, and willful representation through looking. For this exhibition she turns to her archive of over five thousand pictures to consider the subject of healing. Through parallel story lines involving female agency and submission, Carmen's collages prompt the questions: Why are women always depicted as the receiver of demonstrative touch? Can healing be transferred through pictures? In what moments can contact be both violent and tender? Can something so enormously internal - emotional and bodily restoration - possibly be depicted in an outward way?
Her principal medium is collage with various hand-dyed images as well as paintings. Carmen seeks to disrupt conventional collage strategies as she integrates the "foreground" (images), and the "background" (paper or supporting surface). Rather than driving towards "aesthetic" compositions, she thinks more in terms of how to make collage that demonstrates its own messy process, letting it set its own dictates, questioning how to reverse (or collapse) the image and field through negative space or material treatment. Some of the images are dyed in red food coloring, a strategy that removes their "image-ness," treating them like fabric or raw paper, material that absorbs color. She then leaves them on dozens of sheets of white paper to absorb the bleed, a standard way of working for her. Instead of "curating" them from there, she adhered them directly to the paper they bled into, in the spot they were initially placed without concern for arrangement or attractiveness. A kind of anti-compositional, anti-aesthetic decision-making. The work stands then as finished and forever in process, at once.
Carmen Winant (b. 1983, San Francisco) lives and works in Columbus, OH. She received her BA from UCLA and Masters degrees in Critical Studies and Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA. In 2010, she was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Winant will have forthcoming 2016 solo exhibitions at Young World Gallery in Detroit and Beeler Gallery in Columbus, OH; both shows will consider how to be a female artist without foremothers. Her recent projects include an artist book with Horses Think Press titled My Life as a Man and a series of experimental lectures titled DISCIPLINE performed, in 2015, at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (Maine), COR&P (Columbus), MoCA Los Angeles, Regina Rex (NY), Printed Matter (NY), 356 Mission (Los Angeles), and the University of Cincinnati. She is currently at work on an experimental book about practice.