← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
The Camera Lens as a Mirror for Family History in 'My Mother and Eye'
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A new exhibition called “Carmen Winant: My Mother and Eye” can be seen on bus stop shelters around New York, Chicago and Boston.
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WNYC Studios
WNYC Studios is supported by Carnegie hall, which presents the American Composers Orchestra, featuring works by Alice Coltrane and Tonya Leon and premieres by Edmar Castaneda, Clarice Assad and more. March 10th tickets@carnegiehall.org.
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Carmen Winant
Listener supported WNYC studios.
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Next time you're waiting for the bus, keep an eye out for the work of Carmen Winant. Carmen is an artist. She was selected for the Public Art Fund's latest exhibition, which displays Carmen's artwork on bus shelters around New York, Boston and Chicago. For her installation, Carmen used road trip memories. But not just any road trips. Two cross country road trips that Carmen and her mother took when they each for teenagers in the late 60s and early 2000s. Wyna and her mom both brought film cameras on their trips to document the experience. And Wyna has taken stills from those reels and layered them together. You can see an example of what I'm talking about right now on our Instagram llevnyc. The exhibition is on view through April 6th. It's called My Mother and I Eye. Author Carmen Winant, whose work you might recognize from last year's Whitney Biennial is joining us now. Hi Carmen.
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Carmen Winant
Hi. Thank you so much for having me and for that lovely introduction.
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Alison Stewart
You are so welcome. How did you first get the idea of blending film stills from these two very separate road trips that you and your mom took as teenagers?
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Carmen Winant
Well, there's a couple ways in to that story. I mean, the short way of answering it is to say that I was actually commissioned to make a work the year before at fomu, which is a photo museum in Antwerp in Belgium. And that show was Commissioning Artist to Respond to the Legacy of Chantal Aukerman, who is a very well known avant garde and experimental filmmaker and writer who had such an interesting position in sort of relation to her mother, who has really long described herself as an as an adult child and really thought about what it meant to identify oneself as a daughter into adulthood. So I sort of took that cue for that exhibition and began to dig into these films that my mother had made, as you said in your introduction in 1969 as she drove with her friend Judy across the country. But that was a rather small commission and installation. And so when I got the opportunity to make this larger scale public exhibition through Public Art Fund, I wanted to return to it and think about how I could sort of expand the project. It felt like there was more there. So that's the short way into it. And the longer way into it, perhaps we could talk about. I'll just briefly say that I've long been interested in feminine feminist histories and the relationship between sort of generations and how we inherit a kind of political consciousness.
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Alison Stewart
So Judy and your mom traveled from LA to Niagara Falls. How much did you know about the trip?
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Carmen Winant
Well, the trip was sort of family lore, so I knew actually a fair amount about it. Growing up, my mom would tell us bedtime stories about, you know, how they once slept in a jail because they had nowhere else to sleep. How they would hide in the trunk of the car when they needed to pay to, you know, to. To cross a body of water on the ferry. There was a lot of. There was a lot of. There was sort of an aura of, you know, of playfulness and adventure that I knew my mother had made this trip. I didn't know that there was films of the trip, however, until My mother turned 70 about four or five years ago. And I reached out to Judy to ask her if she had any photographs. And she said, boy, oh boy, have I got better than photographs. We made Super 8 films and I have them digitized. So that was really the beginning of everything.
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Alison Stewart
When you sat down to talk about the. The exhibition, what was your mother's goal for this actual road trip? What was the original plan?
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Carmen Winant
Yeah, that's a good question. You know, they were 18. It was 1969, which, you know, according to some people, is the Summer of Love. It was, of course, the summer that Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. It was the summer of Woodstock. In fact, they were in New York during Woodstock. Sorry for the dog barking in the background, and managed to miss was the summer of the Manson murders. I mean, it was, you know, they were stepping into such a pivotal moment in history, you know, to say nothing of the burgeoning feminist movement to which they became very committed. And so I think that probably. What did they know? They probably didn't know a lot of that as it was happening. They knew that they were coming from very patriarchal homes. They knew that they wanted to have a big independent adventure. You know, these are, you know, working class Jewish girls who grew up on the same block in Los Angeles. And this was the first opportunity to strike out on their own, which they did.
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My guest is Carmen Winant. You can currently see her installations of her work called My Mother and I on bus stops around New York, Chicago and Boston as part of the Public Art Fund. It is happening through April 6th. Carmen will be hosting an art talk on the show at the Cooper Union on March 26th at 6:30pm let's talk about your road trip. You drove from Philly to LA in 2001. You had a 35 millimeter camera along for the ride. What do you remember about wanting to go on this road trip?
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You know, retrospectively? I think now that it was informed by the stories that I heard about my mother's road trip at the same age. Although at the time I don't think I had that consciousness. I set out, as you say, from Philadelphia, where I grew up. I was going to school at ucla and I had enlisted a few friends to drive with me. There were four of us driving across the country at the time. I was really just discovering photography. And So I took my 35. It was actually my father's 35 millimeter camera. And I, you know, I made very different kinds of pictures than my mother. I made, you know, pictures of leaves that I encountered and, you know, pictures. I don't think I have a single picture of the horizon line, pictures of, of my hands, pictures of the backs of my friends heads. I was sort of a burgeoning conceptualist. And you know, looking back now, my mother has like, documented, you know, the joyousness of being with her friends on this trip. And I had a very different approach.
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As you looked at your photos and then you looked at your mother's images, stills from the films, what relationship did you see between your photos and her photos?
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You know, on the surface of it, not much. We had a really different way. Well, I should add, my mother was not making photographs. She was making, you know, they were shooting Super 8 films in which I grabbed stills, hundreds and hundreds of stills for the project. So they became still photographs, but started as moving image. You know, on the face of it, they look really different. My pictures, like I say, are very academic. They're very studied. You know, they're sort of these serious typologies. And my mother is recording, you know, playful dances that they're doing on the road or encountering flamingos at the zoo. So if anything, it was kind of a study in contrasts. And I was really interested sort of less in thinking about my pictures in relation to hers or as a kind of antipode to hers, but rather thinking about sort of them both as different kinds of travelogues that I could weave together such that they become rather indistinguishable in the ultimate installation and compositions.
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What was your process for identifying which stills that you'd like to take out of your. Your mom's Super 8 films?
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Oh, I took. I took thousands. I mean, there's two films. One is about six minutes and one is about eight minutes. As we know, film is expensive and was not indefinite. They're covered in dust. You know, they're really sort of beautiful objects. And I just. I was indiscriminate. I went in and I captured as many stills as I possibly could, and I printed them out. And I. I think I initially printed out about 2,200. And I just said to myself in the studio, I'll just move these around. And I gave myself the prompt to try to tell the story out of order, whatever that meant and whatever that might look like. And through that strategy, I hesitate even to call it a strategy. It was something rather looser. I narrowed this. I narrowed down the kind of sort of vignettes that I. That ended up, you know, entering into. Into the storytelling process or, you know, on. Onto the compositions. So, for instance, Niagara Falls, which they filmed, you know, one of the films is minutes and minutes of Niagara Falls looming across the falls or in and out of the water, such that the water turns abstract, plays a major role. So there's hundreds and hundreds of pictures of Niagara Falls, and there's lots of pictures of them making sort of filming out the window as they drive through the Rockies, as they drive through cornfields, you know, in the Plains. So I tended to gravitate towards those kinds of scenes. But I hesitate to say that that was intentional at the outset.
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Did you find that you and your mother had a similar sensibility at the age of 18 and being on the road?
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I think my mother was more adventurous than I was. But, you know, like I said, she was coming from a much more patriarchal home. You know, I was coming from a feminist household, so I. I think that I had less to push against, if that makes sense. And my mother had a lot more to, in some sense, like, to gain or to prove and to feel, you know, that she had been sort of denied, in some sense, expression or experience of. Before that. And so I. You know, it's amazing thing to spend time with your mother as a young woman. And that's what I got to do through this project. And what I encountered sort of over and over was her sense of wonder and joyfulness. Yeah.
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What did you learn about your mom by doing this?
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Oh, I learned how brave she is. I mean, I suppose I always knew that, but, you know, I learned how eager she was, maybe even more than I knew, to strike out alone and how ready she was for, you know, the feminism that was to meet her just a few years later, you know, 1969. Of course, we look back now retrospectively, we can understand that as a turning point in the zeitgeist, you know, in the collective political consciousness. And I can really. I can see my mom as an 18 year old in ways that are sort of ineffable, you know, opening herself up to that in these pictures and ready for it and becoming available.
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My guest is artist Carmen Winant. You can currently see her installations of her work called My Mother and I on Bus Stops in New York, Chicago and Boston as part of the Public Art Fund. It's happening through now through April 6th. All right, so when you see these pictures together, they're. They're collage, like, in style. Why did you go with this effect versus just a huge picture of your mom, a huge picture of your two pictures together versus these huge collage style and not to mention the size of a bus stop.
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Right, yeah. So each composition holds several hundred photographs. So, you know, I mentioned earlier this desire to attempt to tell stories out of order. I'm trained as a photographer, and I was always, even as a young person, as an undergraduate at ucla, really interested. Interested in thinking about collage aesthetics, certainly, but also photographs in some. The relationship in some sense, between the photographs being every bit as interesting and viable as the photographs themselves. So when you're being taught photography, you know, you learn how to make a contact sheet, and then you circle the photograph you want to print and you. We call that the hero image. And I always eschewed that idea. I always thought, isn't this contact sheet really the most interesting thing? And so, you know, as I've grown into my practice, I have sort of given myself permission and confidence to be able to. Yeah, to sort of de center this more conventional strategy of sort of turning to one image or telling. Using photographs to sort of tell a story in a neat linear sequence. And that felt really appropriate here, as this project has so much to do with memory and is sort of reaching backwards or sort of making sense of a kind of shared, you know, discontinuous history. So that. That felt all the more salient.
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Alison Stewart
Why are bus Stops great locations for public art?
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Carmen Winant
Oh, I. I was just saying to Melanie Kress, who runs Public Art Fund, how after this project, all I want to do is public art. It has been so galvanizing. It is so thrilling to have my work out in the world first and foremost. Not in a museums, in a museum, which I certainly appreciate, but not everybody has access to, you know, and to hear from my cousin in New York and friends I haven't seen or talked to in a decade, you know, that they're seeing, to say nothing of countless strangers that they're encountering. You know, these photographs of me and my mother and Judy, you know, 40 years apart, you know, out in New York or Boston, is just, it's hard to describe, like, the thrill of that. And I would say too, and this is something that Melanie pointed to early in the process, like how appropriate that these images should be not just outside in public space, but on bus shelters. You know, a place where people are on the move, where they're in transit, where they're transient, in some cases, you know, related to a project that is very much about, you know, what happens as we crisscross the landscape and in some ways what can only happen when we're on the move and together. So it felt incredibly appropriate and on the nose in the best way.
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My guest is artist Carmen Winant.
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Alison Stewart
You can currently see installations of her work called My Mother and I. Carmen, thank you for the time today.
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Carmen Winant
Oh, thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me on.
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