Jill O'Bryan

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.

[4][5][6] 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.

[10][13] 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.

[22][23][10][12] 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).

[6][13][1] 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.

[6][13][26] 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,[2] topographical maps or entire landscapes,[27][1] grave-rubbings,[28] and Australian Aboriginal drawings.

"[24] 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.

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.

[22] 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.