“There’s a photographer who said something that I really love and think about a lot — ‘Photography plus time equals something else,’” Sara Winston told me recently in an interview,1 “I feel like I am constantly undergoing that experience of the ‘plus time equals something else,’ because my infusion series is all about watching my body be a measurement of a symbol of time passing.”
When Hudson Valley-based artist Sara J. Winston was diagnosed with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (MS) in 2014, she was forced to reckon with the limitations and potential expiration date of her physical form—where an everyday semblance of normalcy suddenly required frequent injections and constant medical care.
A recent exhibition at Blue Sky Gallery displayed several prints from her series, Our body is a clock (2020–present), an ongoing practice of self-portraits taken while Winston undergoes monthly intravenous medical treatment for MS. The photographs on display were taken between 2020 and 2023.
Winston has created several artist books, with bookmaking being one of her primary modalities, and the exhibition feels as if the contents of a book have been exploded onto the walls of the gallery. The unframed large-format matte prints have been pinned to the walls, like pages ripped from a binding. As if living inside an artist’s book, like many of Winston’s photographic series, the images at Blue Sky feel sequential, interrelated, and function best in dialogue with one another. While the beige armchair, bland hospital curtains, and plastic tubing of the IV dangling from her hand always appear in each photograph, the artist’s hair grows and is cut; her clothing changes with the season; her partner appears in the corner in one shot, a nurse in another. Winston’s countenance and her relationship to the camera shift between each photo as well. At times, she looks directly and fiercely at the viewer-slash-camera; in others, she grimly averts her eyes. Similar to the way the meaning of a word changes slightly each time it’s used, the viewer begins to develop their own narrative in relation to the minute details each frame —the story of a woman, an artist, grappling with the limitations, joys, and sorrows of her body. The sequential documentation of Winston’s body through the powerful act of photography makes her body and its hidden illness visible. “Photography plus time” equates to Winston’s poignant vulnerability, one that points to her own fragility and existential grappling.
Winston was first diagnosed when she was finishing her MFA at Columbia College in Chicago, IL, where she focused on photography. However, it wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic that Winston first began to explore self-portraiture. Concurrently, the artist became a mother for the first time, and these new demands on her body coincided with new threats, somehow opening pathways in her creative life, too. Where, previously, her work suggested her body without representing it, she discovered an urgency to present herself to the camera more directly. She explained, “I’ve told people that I never made a self-portrait before. I think there’s something that happened when I became a parent where I didn’t care as much about certain things that I had been really insecure about [in the past]. I felt emboldened, in some ways. And part of my decision to turn the camera on myself, both in the hospital and at home, was to just see what it looked like for me to be in this new role.”
Through the documentation of her treatment, Winston not only makes chronic illness visible, speaking to a subjective experience of the healthcare system in the United States, she also underscores the power of the image to create connection and meaning where it previously did not exist. Through her meticulous return to the camera, the continuous documentation of her body as time moves forward, Winston invites the viewer into a two-fold space otherwise hidden: the space of creative work and human mortality. “There is a paradigm of disability where we all enter the world disabled, and we all leave the world disabled too,” she reflected, “Being able-bodied is an impermanent state and a hard-to-define state also. We come into the world as babies who can’t do anything, and if we’re fortunate, we age and become less physically able-bodied at some point, too.”
1 Quote from an unpublished interview with the artist from September 2023.
Sara J. Winston: Our body is a clock
Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, OR
May 1, 2025 to May 31, 2025
This review was made possible by generous support from Critical Conversations, The University of Oregon Center for Art Research (CFAR), and The Ford Family Foundation.