Jill O'Bryan (born 1956) is an American contemporary artist whose work draws upon breath, bodily movement and the natural environment in order to examine the experience of being, time and place.
[Beachy-Quick, Dan]
"Jill O’Bryan,"
''Artforum'', October 2022. Retrieved December 6, 2022.[Newhall, Edie]
''Philadelphia Inquirer'', May 6, 2012. Retrieved December 6, 2022.[Shapland, Jenn]
"Inside Nature and Time: Charles Ross + Jill O’Bryan,"
''Southwest Contemporary'', July 1, 2017. Retrieved December 6, 2022. She is most known for her "Breath Drawings," in which she records each of her breaths with an individual mark thousands of times, and her ground rubbings (
frottages), which document her physical engagement with the New Mexico desert mesa.
[Weideman, Paul]
"State of being: Jill O’Bryan’s Mapping Resonance,"
''Pasatiempo'', January 13, 2017. Retrieved December 6, 2022.[Tresp, Lauren and Clayton Porter]
"Studio Visit: Jill O’Bryan,"
''THE Magazine'', November 1, 2017. Retrieved December 6, 2022.[MacQueen, Kathleen]
"In Site/In Mind: Jill O'Bryan,"
''Shifting Connections'', December 10, 2013. Retrieved December 6, 2022. ''Southwest Contemporary'' wrote, "O’Bryan’s artmaking is not an act of representational picture-making but a practice of accumulating the residue of recorded time and place through the physical actions of her body. Her process is performative, specifically located in time and space, and records moment-to-moment interactions with the elements."
[Rizzo, Angie]
"Jill O’Bryan,"
''Southwest Contemporary'', July 30, 2021. Retrieved December 6, 2022.
O'Bryan has exhibited in drawing, artist-book and other surveys at the
Zimmerli Art Museum Zimmerli is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
*Patrick Zimmerli
* Sandra Zimmerli (born 1965), Swiss ski mountaineer and radio journalist
* Walther Zimmerli (1907–1983), Swiss academic theologian
See also
*Zimmerli Art Museum a ...
,
Kemper Art Museum
The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum is an art museum located on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, within the university's Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. Founded in 1881 as the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts, it w ...
,
[Nackman, Rachel]
"Jill O’Bryan,"
''Notations: Contemporary Drawing as Idea and Process'', St. Louis, MO: Kemper Art Museum, 2012. Retrieved December 7, 2022. Katonah Museum of Art
The Katonah Museum of Art is a non-collecting institution geared towards visual arts, located in Katonah, New York, Katonah, New York (state), New York. It does not have a permanent collection, but holds temporary exhibitions.
The museum was foun ...
,
[Gold, Sylviane]
"Sublime Notions From a Species That Likes to Doodle,"
''The New York Times'', February 18, 2011. Retrieved December 6, 2022. Hafnarfjör∂ur Centre of Culture and Fine Art (Iceland),
[Raffel, Amy]
"Jill O'Bryan,"
''Art=Text=Art'', Hafnarfjör∂ur, Iceland: The Hafnarfjör∂ur Centre of Culture and Fine Art, 2013. Retrieved December 7, 2022. New Mexico Museum of Art[New Mexico Museum of Art]
"Breath Taking,"
Exhibitions. Retrieved December 7, 2022. and
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of char ...
,
as well as through a commission from
The Phillips Collection.
[Hass, Nancy]
"A Land Art Pioneer’s Adventures in Time and Space,"
''The New York Times'', July 21, 2020. Retrieved December 6, 2022.[Jadrnak, Jackie]
''Albuquerque Journal'', January 13, 2017. Retrieved December 6, 2022. She lives and works in
SoHo, Manhattan
SoHo, sometimes written Soho (South of Houston Street), is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Since the 1970s, the neighborhood has been the location of many artists' lofts and art galleries, and has also been known for its variet ...
and New Mexico with her husband, artist
Charles Ross.
[Jadrnak, Jackie]
"An archive of breaths,"
''Albuquerque Journal'', January 13, 2017. Retrieved December 6, 2022.
Education and career
O'Bryan was born in 1956 in Chicago.
She received a BA in art and English literature from
Macalester College in Minnesota in 1978, and studied at the
Leo Marchutz School of Painting and Drawing in Aix-en-Provence, France while an undergraduate.
[The Leo Marchutz School of Painting & Drawing]
"Community Artists."
Retrieved December 6, 2022. In 1990, she earned an MFA from the
San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...
, then moved to New York City with the help of a Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program fellowship (1991–92).
Over the next decade in New York, O'Bryan studied art theory and criticism at
New York University with a focus on
feminist
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that society prioritizes the male po ...
performance art, the body and identity, earning a PhD in 2000.
She also began to exhibit her work, appearing in group shows at
Exit Art and
ABC No Rio
ABC No Rio is a collectively-run non-profit arts organization on New York City's Lower East Side. It was founded in 1980 in a squat at 156 Rivington Street, following the eviction of the 1979-80 Real Estate Show. The centre featured an art gal ...
, among other venues. Her early work moved from more traditional landscape painting to abstracted, internalized landscapes, before turning toward the process-oriented mark-making for which she has gained recognition.
In her later career, she has had solo exhibitions at Gallery Joe (Philadelphia, 2012),
[Greenberg, Alyssa]
"Explorations of monochrome—All Black at Gallery Joe,"
''Artblog'', May 27, 2013. Retrieved December 6, 2022. Center for Contemporary Arts (Santa Fe, 2017),
Texas State Galleries (2018),
[Texas State Galleries]
"Jill O'Bryan,"
News, September 2018. Retrieved December 7, 2022. Margarete Roeder Gallery (New York, 2018, 2019)
and Zane Bennett Contemporary Art (Santa Fe, 2022).
In addition to creating art, O’Bryan has written the book, ''Carnal Art: Orlan's Re-facing'' (2005), about the French artist
Orlan
orlan is an internationally recognized French artist.
She is not tied to any one material, technology, or artistic practice. She uses sculpture, photography, performance, video, 3D, video games, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and ro ...
,
[O'Bryan, Jill]
''Carnal Art: Orlan's Re-facing''
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Retrieved December 7, 2022. and published articles in
''Art Journal'',
[O'Bryan, Jill]
"Saint Orlan Faces Reincarnation,"
''Art Journal'', Winter, 1997, p. 50–56. Retrieved December 7, 2022. ''
n.paradoxa
''n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal'' was a biannual academic journal covering feminist art criticism and the work of women artists since the 1970s. It was published by KT press and the editor-in-chief was Katy Deepwell (London).
The ...
'',
[Frueh, Joanna and Tanya Augsburg, Maria Elena Buszek, Jill O'Bryan]
"The Pink of Revolution,"
''n.paradoxa'', July 2002, p.27–35. Retrieved December 7, 2022. ''
The Drama Review
''TDR: The Drama Review'' is an academic journal focusing on performances in their social, economic, aesthetic, and political contexts. The journal covers dance, theatre, music, performance art, visual art, popular entertainment, media, sports, r ...
'',
[O'Bryan, Jill]
"Ontology and Autobiographical Performance: Joanna Frueh's 'Aesthetics of Orgasm,'"
''The Drama Review'', Summer 2011, p. 126–36. Retrieved December 7, 2022. and ''Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory''.
[O'Bryan, Jill]
"Penetrating layers of flesh: Carving in/out the bodies of Orlan and Medusa, Artaud and Marsyas,"
''Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory'', Vol. 11, Issue 1, 1999. Retrieved December 7, 2022.
Work and reception
Writers have characterized O'Bryan's work as meditative, spare and
minimalist, rigorous and performative.
[Hackenberg y Almansa, Sigrid. ''Jill O'Bryan: Mapping Resonances''. Santa Fe, NM: Center for Contemporary Arts and Radius Books, 2017.][Speer, Adriana]
"Grounded,"
''DARIA: Denver Art Review: Inquiry & Analysis'' November 2019. Retrieved December 6, 2022. Working at both micro and macro levels, she incorporates intimate, primal human experiences (breath, embodiment, movement) within expansive physical and philosophical considerations (time and space, the elements, land and sky, interconnectedness).
Her artmaking has centered on practices—often involving personal endurance—that mobilize her body, determine and regulate her breathing or sensory contact with the ground, and make tangible the experiences of being, the passage of time (human and geologic), and the immensity of landscape.
[Ardenne, Paul "Inside Nature and Time: Charles Ross + Jill O'Bryan," Las Vegas, NM: Mayeur Projects, 2017.]
"Breath Drawings"
O'Bryan began creating "Breath Drawings" in 2000.
The drawings involve counting and recording her breaths (one inhale and one exhale) with individual graphite marks, during meditations that can last several hours and take place over days, weeks, months or years, depending on the size and scope of the drawing.
The marks, which vary in form across different drawings, are sometimes made next to one another and sometimes on top of one another. They become durational records—intimate visual and tactile archives of the universal experiences of embodiment and interdependence on the environment, transferred to paper.
Her first breath drawing, ''40,000 Breaths Breathed Between June 20, 2000 and March 15, 2005'', took nearly five years to complete.
In her "Tonglen Breath Drawings" (2011–12), O'Bryan drew upon the concept of
Tonglen breathing, a
Buddhist practice of compassion in which practitioners breathe in another's pain, transform it, and breathe out healing.
In these smaller works (e.g., ''18,200 breaths between 4/1/2012 and 4/19/2012''), she layered marks atop one another 20 times (equating to 20 breaths) until the rice paper became incised and frayed under the weight of the accumulated graphite; critic Edith Newhall described the resulting surfaces as resembling, "square, monochromatic pieces of a woolly patterned textile."
In 2019, O’Bryan began producing work that involved listening to her breath while meditating, then imagining the shape of the sound and creating those shapes. These works included her watercolor, acrylic and pencil series "Breathing into the Moon" and "Breathing into the Sky" paintings, both of which suggest universal laws and relationships of the cosmos through simple shapes (triangles, squares, rippling concentric circles) or patches of white resembling clouds and craters.
In a 2022 ''Artforum'' review,
Dan Beachy-Quick
Dan Beachy-Quick is an American poet, writer, and critic. He is the author of eight collections of poems, most recently, ''Variations on Dawn and Dusk'' ( Omnidawn Publishing), longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry. His oth ...
wrote, "O’Bryan attends to the fundamental elements of earthly life. Hers is an attention that attunes not only to the wondrous matter of the world … but to the mystical geometries that bind this planet together, and us to it."
Frottages
O’Bryan’s ground rubbings, or frottages, represent a more outward-focused aspect of her work.
She began these highly physical drawings in 2006 as a way to connect to and record her corporeal interactions with the New Mexico desert land.
[Rice, Robin. "Well-Endowed," ''Philadelphia City Paper'', January 5, 2010.] They were made by laying out large sheets of white paper on the mesa, then lying on top of the paper and making rubbings with chunks of graphite to reveal impressions and pull out the texture of the rocks below.
[Eddy, Jordan]
"Circular Breathing,"
''Santa Fe Reporter'', February 28, 2017. Retrieved December 7, 2022. Reviewers have likened these works (e.g., the 12-foot-tall, scroll-like ''Untitled #10'', 2008 or ''NM.1.22'', 2022), variously, to human skin or X-rays,
topographical maps or entire landscapes,
[Fallon, Roberta. "Size Matters," ''Philadelphia Weekly'', January 13–19, 2010.] grave-rubbings,
[Newhall, Edith. "Very, very large," ''Philly.com'', December 20, 2009.] and Australian
Aboriginal
Aborigine, aborigine or aboriginal may refer to:
*Aborigines (mythology), in Roman mythology
* Indigenous peoples, general term for ethnic groups who are the earliest known inhabitants of an area
*One of several groups of indigenous peoples, see ...
drawings.
[MacGregor, Marilyn]
"Supersized drawings at Gallery Joe,"
''Broad Street Review'', January 12, 2010. Retrieved December 6, 2022. They have suggested that her mark-making in these drawings embeds the landscape into paper (rather than describing it), facilitating its organic emergence from the white surface.
Paul Ardenne
Paul Ardenne (born 4 October 1956) is Professor of history at the University of Amiens, and is also an art critic and a curator in the field of contemporary art.
He grew up in a family of farmers from Charente (for a while he, too, worked in far ...
described the marked paper as "both the surface of inscription and of exchange … equivalent to a situation of intercession: art makes nature speak, and nature makes art speak."
In her 2017 exhibitions "Mapping Resonance" (Center for Contemporary Art) and "Inside Nature and Time" (Mayeur Projects, with Charles Ross), O’Bryan presented frottages alongside a new, related body of work involving impressions made of
metates—flat rocks with hollowed, oblong depressions formed by grinding grains on top of them.
She created the "Metate Paintings" by filling the rocks with India ink or tea, then laying rice paper into them overnight. They have been described as soft, defuse and fluid, organic demarcations of black, grey, and sepia that evoke expanding stars or time; she exhibited them horizontally, on platforms placed at a slight elevation from the gallery floors.
These shows also included a series of circular and conical, downward-pointed plaster vessels, which captured light and reflected it outward and skyward; they allude to both drought and the potential for replenishment.
Public artworks
In 2015, O'Bryan was commissioned by The Phillips Collection to create the outdoor sculpture ''one billion breaths in a lifetime'' in Washington, DC.
[The Phillips Collection]
Jill O'Bryan: one billion breaths in a lifetime
Events, 2015. Retrieved December 7, 2022. The sculpture consists of reflective, polished chrome text of the work's title, in script. "One billion" represents O'Bryan's calculation of the breaths a person would take in a long life of roughly 97 years.
She has also created two related billboard works located between Las Vegas and Santa Fe on I-25 (formerly
Route 66
U.S. Route 66 or U.S. Highway 66 (US 66 or Route 66) was one of the original highways in the United States Numbered Highway System. It was established on November 11, 1926, with road signs erected the following year. The h ...
), each consisting of black text on a bright yellow background. The first, ''A Billion Breaths'' (2013), read "To breathe 1 billion breaths you must live 97 years, 309 days, 6 hours, 51 minutes, 40 seconds."
The second, created during the
COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, read: "7.8 billion of us breathing together right this moment."
Collections
O'Bryan's work belongs to the
Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...
,
[Brooklyn Museum]
1000 Breaths, Jill O'Bryan
Collection. Retrieved December 7, 2022. Colby College Museum of Art,
Davis Museum,
[Davis Museum at Wellesley College]
Jill O'Bryan
Objects. Retrieved December 7, 2022. National Gallery of Art Library,
[National Gallery of Art Library]
Jill C. O'Bryan
Collections. Retrieved December 7, 2022. New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Sarah-Ann and
Werner H. Kramarsky Collection,
among other collections.
References
External links
Jill O'Bryan websiteGallery Conversations: Curator Katherine Ware with Jill O'Bryan
New Mexico Museum of Art, 2021
Studio Visit: Jill O’Bryan
Interview, ''THE Magazine'', 2017
"In Site/In Mind: Jill O'Bryan,"
Interview, ''Shifting Connections'', 2013
Jill O'Bryan
Zane Bennett Gallery
{{DEFAULTSORT:OBryan, Jill
American contemporary painters
American women artists
Artists from New York City
Artists from New Mexico
20th-century American women artists
21st-century American women artists
New York University alumni
San Francisco Art Institute alumni
Macalester College alumni
1956 births
Living people