Gallery Joe Presents Jill O’Bryan, “Rock, Paper, Breath”

Steps away from Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on a narrow avenue, Gallery Joe could be easily missed if one were not looking for it. Gallery Joe’s small size is perhaps one of its greatest strengths as it affords the viewer a more intimate experience with the art it exhibits. Coincidentally, it is the perfect venue for artist Jill O’Bryan’s “Rock, Paper, Breath” the first solo exhibition of the New York and New Mexico-based artist.

O’Bryan has built her entire creative aesthetic on the intrinsic and personal relationship between artist and subject. Her work is a full body experience that exemplifies the physicality involved in the art making process. However, to describe O’Bryan’s work as a simple study of inter-relationships amongst subject and medium, artist and viewer, body and earth would be an understatement. O’Bryan has forced the viewer to come face to face with creation.

Entering the gallery’s anterior room one is confronted by O’Bryan’s “Breath Drawings” so named because of the number of breaths the artist took in creating the pieces that at first glance appear to be obtrusively static geometric renderings. Upon closer inspection, this minimalism reveals a complex symbology reminiscent of ancient hieroglyphs or some long extinct alien language, perhaps a precursor to our own. The breath pieces provide the pretext for the rest of the exhibit by establishing O’Bryan’s ability to bring us into the prehistory of art itself.

Beyond these flat circles and lines are small squares of black comprised of graphite on rice paper. Through natural processes, the fragile rice paper unravels making once flat surfaces three-dimensional. They are examples of O’Bryan’s devotion to engaging form and medium. The starkly meditative negatives have the appearance of wool textiles, but like looking into a mirror without a reflection, they become exercises in introspection.

A steel blast door separates the vault gallery from the rest of the space. A video of O’Bryan herself greets the viewer, an introduction to her expansive “Rock Drawings” simply known as NM5, NM6 and so on. We see the artist working in the New Mexico desert sprawled on a sheet of paper, rubbing graphite against the parchment to capture the impressions of the earth underneath.

Minuscule details are the most revealing. Like the identifying markers of a fingerprint, smudges and microscopic tears juxtapose bringing to the surface the interdependence of subject and medium, as well as O’Bryan’s own physical presence. Every shadow and raw space maps the artist’s personal involvement with the work while elucidating a strict reliance on form as dictated by the subject. The earth is presented in its static form, yet for a moment we feel O’Bryan and the same New Mexico sun she herself felt. In this way, we are one with subject and artist.