Broken Time Machines: Daisy Patton

Minerva Projects presents their first book: Broken Times Machines: Daisy Patton.

Broken Times Machines centers its lens on artist Daisy Patton. It is Daisy’s work that provides impetus for this written conversation: her art and her activism draw authors forward, compelling them to write with freedom and intention about memory, erasure, decay, disappearance, pattern and ornament, maximalism and minimalism, and women, whose stories, against all odds, prevail.

The volume’s title is quoted from Sommer Browning’s contribution. This librarian, independent gallery owner, and poet shares Minerva’s openness to play. William Max Nelson, an historian experimenting with the reaches of creative nonfiction, gifts this project words to understand how our face-to-face encounters manifest in stories and their telling. Salma Ahmad Caller, a polyglot, meanders from the medical sciences to the fraught field of art histories as required when loosening the knots that bind images, restricting interpretations of art and its signification. Adèle Cassigneul, a literary critic, researches the interplay of text and image, histories that inform this press as profoundly as Adèle’s feminism. Within this efficient, modestly scaled volume the poems of award-winning author Elaine Feeney anchor the disparate and numerous ideas that build the book—a set of responses to Daisy Patton’s work. 

Each spread in this volume is treated as a facet within a series of pages. Designer Joshua Gamma dances with the conventions of books: toying with typeface size, attribution hierarchies, and the sanctity of images to direct attention to the systems at work in this ancient and everlasting format where knowledge accrues meaning and value.

Generous and radically hopeful supporters have made this book possible. We thank:

Kealey Boyd, Doug Kacena of K Contemporary in Denver, Elysia Solomon, Enrique Suárez Cabrera, Lauren Shadford & Glendon Breismeister, Becky Hart, Sandra Firmin, Marshall Birnbaum, Eugenie (Ayse) Perret, Stacey Allan, Sarah McKenzie, Colleen Egan Gotze, Risa Friedman, the Cain & Gorman Family, Keren & Michael Nimmo, Lisa Hatchadoorian, Renee Philippi, Bradley Kik, Kathryn Hart, Elizabeth Smith, Millicent Young, Nestor Guillen, Katie & Michael Jesionowski, Linda Ganjian, Brenda Mallory, Emilie Upczak, Michael Velasquez, Gariné Torossian, Reyhan Akdogan, Trine Bumiller, Kelly Duffield, Aimee Franklyn, András Böröcz, Sharon Louden, and Sherry A. Wiggins.