Carmen Winant, Arrangements

This book of multivalent narratives began with a simple premise: collecting of sheets of paper – ripped from books – featuring multiple photographs and inlaid narratives. Across a decade of working on other projects involving pulling images apart from one another, excising them from the page, and recontextualizing them as new sets, American artist Carmen Winant diligently collected disparate sheets, skimming them off the top of her other ongoing collections. The book that has resulted from that work is wide-ranging in terms of subject – with sheets depicting rabbinical study, dog training, surgical birth, methods of tantric sex, patterns of the sunset – yet specific in approach and application. Her constructed pages trouble how the idea of ‘theme’ operates as the engine of a book, instead taking the act of arranging, both in discreet pages and as a whole, as its own meaningful subject.