This book of multivalent narratives began with a simple premise: the collection 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 (born 1983) 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 discrete pages and as a whole, as its own meaningful subject.

Carmen Winant (born 1983) is an artist and writer based in Columbus, OH, where she is the Roy Lichtenstein Endowed Chair of Studio Art at Ohio State University. Winant's recent projects have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the SculptureCenter, New York; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; Wexner Center of the Arts, Columbus; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; and the CONTACT Photography Festival, Toronto. Winant's recent artist books, My Birth and Notes on Fundamental Joy, were published by SPBH Editions, ITI Press, and Printed Matter, Inc. Winant’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Minneapolis Institute of Art; and the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo. Winant was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography in 2019 and a Pew Center for Arts & Heritage grant in 2020. She currently holds an FCA Artist Grant and is the winner of the Images Vevey Book Award 2021/2022. Winant is the mother of two sons, Carlo and Rafa, who she shares with her partner, Luke Stettner.