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
  • ABOUT
    • CV
    • Articles, Interviews, Links
    • Writing
  • NEWS
George Floyd Jr., May 25, 2020
2020
Graphite on Bhutan Mitsumata rice paper.
10.5 x 11 inches

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd Jr. was killed in Minneapolis by a police officer while he was under arrest. The officer knelt on Floyd’s neck for a reported 8 minutes and 46 seconds. His death sparked numerous protests and demonstrations calling for renewed attention to systemic racism in the United States and the inequitable treatment of people of color by law enforcement. Reflecting on Floyd’s death, I created two drawings while thinking about Floyd and the duration of time he gasped for breath. In one, I make "breath marks" for 8 minutes, 46 seconds, to find out how many breaths I breathed during that time, how many breaths George Floyd was deprived of. In the other I mark the paper for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, using “holy dirt” from northern New Mexico’s El Sanctuario de Chimayó (famous for its healing power), while thinking about the terrible interval in which his breath was taken.  


All images copyright Jill O'Bryan

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