Increasingly frustrated by her limited access to a copier, Pati Hill began writing short texts that she classified and copied onto colored paper, ostensibly green for dreams, pink for objects, and yellow for moments—but with exceptions to this scheme to challenge viewers’ expectations. The idea was to focus attention on the filters and lenses through which we view everyday experience and to create “a kind of stereopticon novel.” Hill presented her Dreams Objects Moments series for the first time in 1976 at Kornblee Gallery, New York.

The “dreams” were subsequently published by Kornblee Gallery in book form here as Dreams Objects Moments. (Hill intended to publish the “objects” and “moments” as Dreams Objects Moments and Dreams Objects Moments, respectively.) “Not everybody liked my exhibition,” Hill admitted. “Some said they preferred reading sitting down. [Hill, Letters to Jill, p.56.] Some texts resemble poems while others could be short stories, but they all share the same illustrative and concise quality, the same humor—cynical, detached and tender towards the characters and situations they depict—as well as the same peculiar way of highlighting an unexpected trouble found in ordinary situations, univocal dreams or common objects.

In Letters to Jill, Hill writes to gallerist Jill Kornblee: “After Garments I realized I needed control of the copier to make the kind of pictures I wanted to make and I started trying to get IBM to lend me one…. I decided to make an exhibition that conveyed my feelings about copier work without requiring the use of a copier. The result was about a hundred shallow, literal descriptions of dreams, objects, and moments, which I typed on different colors of paper and hung on three walls of Kornblee Gallery…. The whole is supposed to act a little like a color transparency where each successive layer develops those beneath it, only the successive descriptions of dreams, objects, and moments tend to undevelop the successive layers by making you realize that the distinctions we normally make are nonexistent. And what you are left with at the end is a clean slate instead of a completed view.”