Galerie Timonier: Joe Brainard Pati Hill Ray Johnson

Minor heartbreak: I will not be able to get to Galerie Timonier's exhibit of work by Joe Brainard, Ray Johnson, and Pati Hill (see @Moonbase's rec for another link to PH). I think about Hill all the time; this is a person who wrote books and dedicated a decade to parenthood before discovering an unlikely creative tool: the IBM Copier II. She used it to capture images of ice skates and broken eggs and knotted scarves and dead swans and even tried to photocopy an entire tree. She spooned extra toner into the cartridges seeking ever inkier blacks and wrote books in correspondence with the otherworldly images she made.

From the exhibition essay:

"I wanted to make something that had nothing in it that had anything to do with me, and this is where I started. But I realized, very difficultly, that you couldnʼt. It took me a long time to know that there was no such thing as that, but this is how I started working on a copier." – Pati Hill

This statement by an 89-year-old Pati Hill addresses the challenges faced by an artist who struggled against the instinct to make her life the subject of her work. The impulse to regard oneʼs biography as a creative resource—an inclination embraced by Joe Brainard and Ray Johnson—was foundational to Hillʼs practice as an author. ...  Brainard, Hill, and Johnson each cultivated acute forms of attention, if not a childlike awe, to the material poetics and humor of the everyday, effectively blurring the boundaries between their lives and their protean work. All three artists shared a readiness to make gifts of their art, collaborate, and disavow authorship."