We’re pleased to announce What It’s Like To Be, a new Fundraising Edition by Carmen Winant spanning fifty unique and interrelated pieces. Each work in the series employs a different found photograph mounted on custom-fabricated steel backing and affixed to a thin chain.

The black & white and sepia-toned photographs that populate the series are drawn from Winant’s extensive collection of juvenile literature: image-heavy publications that guide young readers through elemental concepts. The imagery is seemingly uncomplicated and striking in its illustrative quality, communicating ideas around learning, feeling, and living, while imparting the curiosity and tenderness with which children see and make meaning of their world. In one work, two hands gently hold a salamander over the shadowed surface of a pail of water; in another, six boys sit around a table smiling at an unknown secret between them, arms folded over open books.

What It’s Like To Be is a new, unfolding body of work from Winant, drawing on display strategies — found photographs at once mounted and suspended in the expanded field — utilized in the artist’s two most recent solo shows at Fortnight Institute in New York (2020) and 14a in Hamburg, Germany (2019). Here, they stand alone as talismans, open to singular and collective reading.

The most up to date list of available works can be found on the Printed Matter website here.

Produced in an edition of 50, each unique, in seven varying sizes (4 ¼ x 3 ¾" to 6 3/8 x 8 1⁄2"). Signed and numbered by the artist on the reverse in etching pen. Published by Printed Matter, Inc., 2021. Works in Group 1 (Large) - $400 each; Works in Group 2 (Small) - $300 each.

Editions will be on view at Printed Matter starting March 17. Visit printedmatter.org to see latest availability or write to info@printedmatter.org for more information. Each work is one of a kind, available on a first come basis. Unfortunately we are not able to take holds.

Carmen Winant’s work utilizes installation and collage strategies to examine feminist modes of survival and revolt. Winant’s recent projects have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Sculpture Center, The Columbus Museum of Art, The Wexner Center of the Arts, and through CONTACT Photography festival, which mounted twenty-six of her billboards across Canada. Winant’s recent artist books,My Birth and Notes on Fundamental Joy, were published by SPBH Editions, ITI press, and Printed Matter, Inc. Winant is the mother of two sons, Carlo and Rafa, whom she shares with her partner Luke Stettner; she is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in photography.