Jill O'Bryan Art

Jill O'Bryan Art

  • 2020 Element Paintings
  • 2020 Quarantine Drawings
  • 2020 Breath Drawings
  • EXHIBITIONS
    • [TXST} Galleries
    • "Mapping Resonance", CCA Santa Fe
    • Margarete Roeder Gallery, NYC
    • Phillips Collection, Washington DC
    • "rock, paper, breath", Gallery Joe
    • Uruboros Dance for "Mapping Resonance"
  • SITE SPECIFIC INSTALLATIONS
    • "To breathe..." in Las Vegas, NM
    • A Particular Kind Of Solitude, NYC
    • A Place To Which We Can Come, Brooklyn, 2012
    • Take a billion breaths
  • WORK
    • On and Just Above the Ground
      • ground
      • ground (squares)
      • on, and just above ground
      • metates
    • Breath Drawings
      • Tonglen Breaths
      • Archived Breaths 2000-2011
      • X x 20
    • Drawings
    • Paintings
    • Philosopher Stones
    • Grid Drawings
    • Artist Books
      • Breaths
      • Circles 3
    • Performance
  • ABOUT
    • News
    • CV
    • Articles, Interviews, Links
    • Writing
  • CONTACT
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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