The Ohio-based artist and writer Carmen WINANT uses both text and image to question traditional assumptions of women’s bodies. By actively engaging with themes such as eroticism and censorship, Winant confronts and unveils the patriarchal views at play within contemporary culture in order to empower feminine agency. By using found images, Winant hi-lights the emphasis that media has on the female body, particularly the female pregnant body. In her recent book My Birth, a collective portrait of the artist’s own mother and other anonymous women giving birth, Winant investigates the often censored and controlled experience of labour. Winant says she is interested in, “…what constitutes pleasure, pain, and the space between, for the female body. What if submission looks and feels like agency or vice versa?”
Winant’s work has been exhibited widely in both solo and group exhibitions and most recently at the Worcester Museum of Art, Worcester, MA (2019); the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2018); and the Wexner Art Center, Columbus, OH (2017), amongst others. Winant has been nominated for numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2019), the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award (2018), and The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2018). Winant’s installation My Birth (2018) is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY.