Fossil Memory, by Ellery Bryan

May 31 to August 16, 2025

About the Exhibit

Fossil Memory traces history through direct and indirect artifacts, using planetary movements and geological records as jumping-off points for memory and subjectivity. Shooting on celluloid film, Ellery Bryan begins at the solar eclipse and records performances in quarries and rock collections, personal and scientific archives. They collapse vignettes of past gestures into mineral composition, activating silver to visually explore recollection. This work uses material history to probe unstable perceptions, connections and ephemerality.

Artist Statement

I am an experimental filmmaker using the mechanics of recorded image and sound to devise continual ways to remain close to people I can no longer see or speak to. The central challenge of making artwork about grief, personal or collective, is a lack of visible subjects able to speak or gesture. My images make use of my visible world to find symbolic entry points for disembodied presences. I merge archetypal and diaristic symbols of grief into movements and settings that allow the images to transcend their familiar elements. For the last several years, my practice has been based between Baltimore, Maryland and central New York. New York’s public lands and decommissioned quarries offer expansive locations for my performances to take place, marked by their history of extraction and ecological destruction that resounds through a sense of communal loss.

I make analog films and photographs, time-based performances, direct animations and sonic environments addressing the sudden loss of my partner and the gestures of grief that I witness in my community. Recently, I have begun to explore the construction of memory through the lens of fossil records and narratives assigned to natural history. In my film My Body is a Lens I Can Look Through With My Mind, I construct still lives using scientific artifacts and objects from personal archives to point to the intentional creation of meaning. Because I came to film from a background in sculpture, my moving image practice is tactile and reflexively references form. I use sound, film manipulation and abstraction to create sensory, complex and multi-layered works about subjective perceptions of the past and their effect on the present.

About the artist

Ellery Bryan (they/them) is a nonbinary visual artist and educator translating physical to ephemeral media. Their artwork traces non-narrative themes of loss and ritualized gestures of connection through analog films, photographs, performances, and sonic installations. Their work has shown internationally at venues including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum of the Moving Image, the Everson Museum and the Blue Building Gallery. They are based in Baltimore, Maryland, and central New York, and hold an MFA in Art Video from Syracuse University. Perennial return to sublime landscapes and communal activism forms the basis of their research.