LACY SOTO | DATE 3/2/2024

Artbook at Hauser & Wirth LA Bookstore presents Pippa Garner in conversation with P. Staff and Sara O'Keeffe

Join Artbook at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore at 3 PM on Saturday, March 2, for a celebration of Pippa Garner: $ELL YOUR $ELF, published by Pioneer Works Press and Art Omi. Octogenarian and self-described “senior slut,” Pippa Garner’s lusty practice spans mail-order catalogs, classified ads, garments with cutouts, custom cars, tattoos and performances on the streets and on television. From the early aughts to the present, as Garner’s vision has waned, she has maintained a practice of producing a t-shirt a day, using iron-on letters to tinker with popular phrases in ways that reclaim their lusty potential and thumb her nose at assimilationist narratives. Join the legendary Misc. Pippa with artist P. Staff and curator Sara O'Keeffe as they discuss how to wreak havoc on the world as we know it.
Join in-person or livestream on Instagram at @artbookhwla. Register for the event and order a signed copy here!

Organized on the occasion of the publication of $ELL YOUR $ELF, a kaleidoscopic survey of the work of visionary artist Pippa Garner from the 1960s to the present. Bringing together Garner's most iconic projects for the first time, this richly illustrated monograph features her work in custom cars, hormone-hacking, and in offering deviant solutions to everyday problems. The publication features newly commissioned texts by Pippa's friends and admirers including Nayland Blake, McKenzie Wark, Jackie Ess, House of Ladosha, Chip Lord, Ed Ruscha, and Philippa Snow. Pippa will sign copies of $ELL YOUR $ELF and Better Living Catalog at the event.

Pippa Garner trained as a car designer, but was kicked out the ArtCenter College of Design in 1969 for presenting a car morphing into a human body. Undeterred by her expulsion, Garner conceived of her first major car work in 1973, Backwards Car, a 1959 Chevy with its exterior rotated 180 degrees so it appeared to face the wrong way as it drove. In a gesture at once daredevil stunt and conceptual probe, Garner scaled San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in the work. In the mid-eighties, Garner began gender-hacking with hormones—a process that she considers a conceptual artwork—marking an extension of her practice from twenty years of altering cars, garments, and consumer products to using her own body as raw material. Much of her work has been in infiltrating mass media, from classified ads to the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

Recent solo exhibitions include $ELL YOUR $ELF, at Art Omi, which premiered her latest conceptual car Haulin’ Ass! (2023) and was accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue co-published with Pioneer Works Press; I’m With Me at OCD Chinatown, New York (2023); Act Like You Know Me at Kunstverein Munich (2022), Kunsthalle Zúrich (2023), FRAC Lorraine, Metz (2023), and White Columns (2023); Immaculate Misconceptions at JOAN, Los Angeles (2021) and Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento (2022); and A Shadow of My Future Self at O-Town House, Los Angeles (2019). She was included in Made In L.A. 2023: Acts of Living (2023), Set Scene, Art Production Fund (2024), and is participating in the 2024 Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than the Real Thing.

P. Staff is an artist based in Los Angeles and London, UK. They frequently collaborate with other artists, dancers, historians and public participants creating malleable frameworks for socially engaged research mediated by moving image. Their work has been presented internationally, including solo shows at Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee (2019); MOCA, Los Angeles (2017); Spike Island, Bristol (2016); and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015). Recent group exhibitions have included The Body Electric, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019); Made in LA, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); and Trigger, New Museum, New York (2015).

Sara O’Keeffe is Senior Curator at Art Omi. She curated Pippa Garner: $ELL YOUR $ELF (2023), Pippa Garner's first institutional solo exhibition in New York accompanied by a fully-illustrated monograph copublished with Pioneer Works Press. She previously held curatorial positions at the New Museum, where she co-curated Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon (with Johanna Burton and Natalie Bell), was on the curatorial team for the 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience (with Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin), and curated projects with Sable Elyse Smith, RAGGA, and Morgan Bassichis, among others.

ARTBOOK AT HAUSER & WIRTH LOS ANGELES BOOKSTORE
$ELL YOUR $ELF: Pippa Garner in conversation with P. Staff and Sara O'Keeffe
Saturday, March 2: 3 PM PST
917 East 3rd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
Phone: 213-988-7413
Click here to pre-order a signed copy