Jill O’Bryan “Breath / Ground: New Work”

Margarete Roeder Gallery

[Image: Jill O'Bryan "nm.6.17" liquid graphite on paper, 10 x 6 feet]

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Margarete Roeder Gallery presents an exhibition of new work by Jill O’Bryan.

Jill O’Bryan’s first solo exhibition at Margarete Roeder Gallery includes new “breath works” and large-scale (10 x 6 feet) “ground works.” The ground works are made on the New Mexico mesa where she resides for half of the year. These over-sized pieces expose the artist’s physical interaction with this mesa; she creates graphite rubbings of the land. Referencing their performative quality, Paul Ardenne, who contributed a catalog essay for “Inside Nature and Time” (Mayeur Projects, 2017) writes, the drawings are both “the surface of inscription and of exchange. The work as is defined by the artist, is equivalent to the situation of intercession: art makes nature speak and nature makes art speak.”

This intercession between art and nature is performed in the breath works as well. Jill O’Bryan creates the drawings by making a mark for each breath, one next to the other, composing a grid of graphite. She archives each of her breaths in hours-long marathon sessions that happen over several months, or years.

Lauren Tresp of THE Magazine, Santa Fe, describes O’Bryan’s work as coming “down to earth and body, to mark making that embeds the landscape into paper rather than describes it. Her work converses in material residues: of breath, body, sky, water, stone, paper. For the ‘breath drawings,’ O’Bryan makes a single stroke for every breath … saturating the paper with graphite to the point of textured fraying.”

Jill O’Bryan lives and works in New York and New Mexico. Her latest solo exhibition took place at the Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, NM in 2017. She has exhibited widely, including The Phillips Collection, Washington DC; The Hafnarfjör∂ur Centre of Culture and Fine Art, Hafnarfjör∂ur, Iceland; Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, MO; Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; University of Richmond Museums, Richmond, Virginia; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, Spain.