Charles Ross + Jill O’Bryan
Inside Nature And Time

June 9 – July 22, 2017

The combined artworks of Jill O’Bryan and Charles Ross, again, can be associated in the name of time. One like the other, each with his or her own methodologies, integrates in both cases a determining experience into the artistic process, the experience of duration.[1]

O’Bryan like Ross, one and the other, one like the other, are indeed artists of time. “Of” time, what does this mean? The use of the genitive – which determines “that which belongs to” – proves itself, for the essential occasion, in this: it defines the nature of creation of each of these artists. Being a creator “of” time, who belongs to it, who gives himself over to it and gives to time its own creative share, to the heart of the artwork, this is the consequence of a choice. The creative option to which we subscribe here is the integration of a temporal element in the fabrication of an artwork, making time one of the tools of creation.

Paul Ardenne – Art critic, writer, curator – Las Vegas New Mexico, April 2017

There is indeed corporality in Charles Ross’s treatment of light. He does not leave any doubt that this intellectual body to body has become evident from a complicit and daily confrontation with light in the high plateaus of New Mexico.

At the extremities of the spectrum of colors are absolute light and darkness, white and black, extreme points evoking an abstract minimalism.

Jill O’Bryan plays out a different body to body. Between shadow and light, her body gives rhythm to and draws out her rubbed drawings, oscillating between black and white, realized on the ground of the mesa itself. As with Charles, her relationship to light is at once direct and mediated.

Christian Mayeur – Owner & founder, Mayeur Projects – Las Vegas New Mexico, April 2017

[1] L’expérience de la durée, 8th Contemporary Art Biennial of Lyon, exhibition catalog, 2005.

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