URRENT YEAR meditates on the state of the present as a landscape that is created, transmitted, and understood through lenses and screens. In this exhibition, Mayer presents glass across a diversity of sculptural contexts—as irregularly-shaped, multi-colored panes suspended from the gallery’s ceiling, the walls, and from metal and fiberglass objects—to address its intrinsic vulnerabilities and contradictions, its ubiquity and evolution as a tool of communication, and as an aspirational substance of futurity.
The impact of the digital landscape on human relations and the human body are concepts that Mayer unravels in her practice through arch, tongue-in-cheek works that point towards the increasing co-dependence and potential cybernetic symbiosis between humans and machines. Her Slumpies series (2016 to present) is an example of an imagined and utilitarian furniture of the future designed to ergonomically support the various postures of the body while in use of a smartphone. Made from fiberglass cast into irregular, quasi-organic shapes, the handmade aesthetics of Mayer’s Slumpies function in contrast to the highly refined and machine-manufactured finish of the technologies they are meant to complement.
The works in CURRENT YEAR emerge as a natural progression from this series. Mayer fashions smooth panes of glass that—in their production process—bubble and take on irregular forms, comprised of multi-colored layers of glass and paint of diverse finishes and shapes. These hand-made works become windows into the world—lenses, screens, filters—of various opacities and embedded with materials that inexorably alter and color what is seen through the glass. The pieces each function as visual metaphors and illustrate the myriad shifting contexts altering the view through the seemingly invisible filters that mediate how the world is portrayed and understood.
Jillian Mayer (b. 1984, Miami, FL) lives and works in Miami, FL. She received her BFA from Florida International University in 2007. Mayer’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Mayer has an upcoming commission project with Facebook and she is installing her first permanent public art piece this year with Art in Public Places, Miami at the Port of Miami.
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