Jill O'Bryan Art

Jill O'Bryan Art

  • EXHIBITIONS
    • "Breathing into the Elements", Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, Santa Fe
    • "Breath Taking", New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe
    • "Jill O'Bryan" [TXST] Galleries
    • "Mapping Resonance", CCA Santa Fe
    • Margarete Roeder Gallery, NYC
    • "one billion breaths", Phillips Collection, Washington DC
    • "rock, paper, breath", Gallery Joe
    • Uruboros Dance for "Mapping Resonance", CCA, Santa Fe
  • SITE SPECIFIC INSTALLATIONS
    • "7.8 billion of us breathing together..."
    • A Particular Kind Of Solitude, NYC
    • A Place To Which We Can Come, Brooklyn, 2012
    • "To breathe..." in Las Vegas, NM
    • Take a billion breaths
  • WORK
    • 2021 - 2022 Element Paintings
    • 2020 Quarantine Drawings
    • The Shape of the Sound of a Breath
    • Tonglen Breath Drawings
    • Archived Breath Drawings
    • X x 20 Breath Drawings
    • Desert Frottage
    • Desert Frottage (squares)
    • on, and just above ground
    • Metate Paintings
    • Early Drawings
    • Early Paintings
    • Philosopher Stones
    • Grid Drawings
    • Artist Books
      • Breaths
      • Circles 3
    • Performance
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Two Halves of the Moon
2020
Graphite and oil stick on Japanese Daitoshi rice paper.
30 x 56 inches

In New York in spring, 2020, during the lockdown, I experienced a kind of vertigo, I sought my bearings by staring at the moon. I stared as it rose through my front window. I watched its slow progression for hours. Even during the day I followed its form as silver slices, waxing and waning in the blue sky. The moon became a focus of my meditations: I brought it into my body, felt what it was like to be on it, counted breaths to it, imagined the inflation and deflation of my lungs synchronized to its waxing and waning. I joined every person throughout the millennia who contemplated the moon--its female power and energy, mystery, regularity, solidity, and holder of myth and knowledge. The moon guided me back to balance, to my body, and to the breath.

 

In Japanese Kaizen there is a technique called Moon Breath (Chandra Bhedana in Sanskrit), a form of Single Nostril Pranayama designed to promote calm and sleep: block your right nostril with your right thumb, inhale through the left nostril, then block your left nostril with your left thumb and exhale through the right nostril, repeat.

 

Two Halves of the Moon. Two halves, because this is how I experience the body, as a multiple of two: 2 lungs , 2 nostrils, 2 eyes, 2 ears, 2 legs, 2 arms, 2 hands, 2 feet, etc. The scale of the drawing is also relevant. It is loosely in human scale, the two halves are relatively proportional to the size of inflated lungs, and the drawing is slightly less wide than a person standing in front of it with outstretched arms. 


All images copyright Jill O'Bryan

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