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"Jim Gilroy has painted falling figures for the past five or so years. It is a theme that keeps insisting itself on his life in inexplicable and unexpected ways. When he was thirteen, he stood in a crowd of onlookers one afternoon in midtown Manhattan and watched a man jump to his death from a skyscraper. He says he has never forgotten the sound, "like a car crash," that jolted him out of his teenage solipsism. A few years later, Jim and his friends were playing on a rooftop. One friend starting hanging off the side, then he said, "Watch this." He let go and fell to his death. The boy's father came to Jim and wanted to know what had happened to his son. All Jim could tell him was, "He just let go." Jim and another friend used to go up to the top of the World Trade Center before construction was complete. Jim remembers clearly how this friend used to like to go to the edge, and, leaning over, let just the strong winds keep him from falling. Traces of the experience appear in Epiphenomenon, 1999 (38 x 28" oil on linen). Later, Jim moved into a high-rise building. One day he happened to glance out his window and saw the dark brief streak of the man living a few floors above him dropping to his death. In 1999, when Gilroy had his second exhibition at Dactyl Foundation, Neil Grayson investigated some of Gilroy's experiences in the 20-minute documentary entitled, "Don't Let Go," which was shown at the opening. The video ends with the words of Gilroy's long-time friend, filmmaker Larry Clark, who was also featured in the documentary, "You gotta let go. Just let go." Gilroy continued to be haunted by these experiences and has tried to work through them in his art." Victoria N. Alexander and Maria Villafranca