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
    • Cone Paintings 2022
    • 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
I created and recorded a series of “tumbling” performances in a workshop with Marina Abramovic in 1998. They spoof 1970s video art by appropriating some of their signifiers: repetition,pushing the body to the limits (Abramovic, Burden, Vienese Actionism).
The one signifier I alter is the costume. Instead of being nude I am dressed in a “little black dress”, a symbol of the failure of performance art to ultimately have penetrated the artworld as a non-consummable, and within its historicty -- the need for contemporary video performanceto have Hollywood-size budgets eg. Mathew Barney, Shirin Neshat, Bill Viola. I am a clown attempting to re-create the un-recreatable --apparently missing this point -- and doing it all in my fashionable little black dress.

In “Tumble #13” the camera is focused on 1/2 of an empty room where thewall meets the floor in a corner. I stand against the wall facing out,slide down the wall and fall on the floor, landing in a different position each time. I do this for one hour. The hour is taped without interruption and then put on a loop to play continuously.


All images copyright Jill O'Bryan

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