'an unfixed pilgrimage' special edition
COMPOSIT Press is pleased to announce the publication of “an unfixed pilgrimage,” a collaborative monograph by Jared Ragland and Sara J. Winston. The book traces parallel journeys by artists whose lives—and practices—have been reshaped by relocation, loss, and the demands of a creative and academic life.
Ragland and Winston have known one another for 15 years, beginning when Winston was a student of Ragland's at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. Their relationship has since evolved into one of trusted friendship and artistic peerage. Several years ago, in order to put stakes in the ground for the mirage of job security in academia, both Ragland and Winston settled in regions they struggled to call home—Ragland in northern Utah, Winston in the Hudson River Valley. For Ragland it was an alien, and alienating, landscape, far from his native Alabama; for Winston it was familiar countryside, only 40 miles north of where she grew up, but seen anew through the altered consciousness of parenthood and chronic illness.
The work grew from “20-40-10," an assignment developed by Joe Cameron and Claudia Smigrod at the Corcoran. The exercise requires students to expose 20 rolls of film, produce 40 work prints, and complete 10 final prints within a prescribed period. In homage to their shared Corcoran roots, Ragland and Winston adopted the prompt and expanded it into a two-year collaborative investigation.
The photographs document an intimate and elegiac, yet unresolved, journey—embracing a sense of uncertainty that suggests the search for belonging is not found in a specific time or place but through the continued practice of attention, kinship, and care.
About the book: 9 x 11" 144 pages. An annotated photocopy of an excerpt from Wendell Berry's essay "The Unforeseen Wilderness" is stapled to the cover. Edition of 250.
Special Edition Box: 9.5 x 11.5" when closed, 33 x 11.5" when open. Box contains two foldout flaps: the left features a contact print, the right an archival pigment print. Eight boxes will feature prints by Ragland, eight by Winston. The book is housed in the center, situated above a well containing an exposed, yet undeveloped, roll of film by each artist. The original assignment sheet that inspired the work is attached to the front of the box. Edition of 16.
Available Feb. 2027. Pre-order via COMPOSIT Press.
Composit Press, housed in the Art Department of the School of Visual, Performing, and Design Arts at Oregon State University, is a student-staffed printing press and bindery. Within a curricular structure, students design, print, and bind publications with a photographic or art focus. Composit Press in run by Evan Baden, Senior Instructor of Photography and is funded by the sales of it’s Photobooks.
......................................