Jillian Mayer steeps her artistic practice in the verisimilitude of a generation that came of age in the 1980s. Mayer calls upon drawing, photography, video, online platforms, installation, and performance to enact scenarios of apathy, dysfunction, and disillusionment. Indoctrinated into expectations of upward mobility, instant gratification, and the succinct finesse of a television sitcom and web experience, Mayer critiques the dissonance between her childhood optimism and the state of contemporary culture with an erudite playfulness.
In 2010, her video Scenic Jogging was one of the 25 selections for the Guggenheim’s Youtube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video and was exhibited at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain; and Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany.
Recent solo projects include Family Matters at David Castillo Gallery, Miami (2011), Love Trips at World Class Boxing, Miami (2011), and Erasey Page at the Bass Museum of Art (2012). Mayer is currently at work on an artist book to be released by [name] Publications and on a solo show at Locust Projects (Miami) in 2013, for which the gallery received a Harpo Foundation grant.
Her video works have been premiered at galleries and museums internationally and film festivals such as SXSW and Sundance. She was recently featured in Art Papers and in ArtNews discussing identity, Internet and her artistic practices and influences.
Mayer is a recent recipient of the prestigious South Florida Cultural Consortium's Visual/Media Artists Fellowship 2011, Cintas Foundation Fellowship 2012, and was named one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker Magazine. She has been awarded the Elsewhere Residency as a NEA Southern Constellation Fellow and the Zentrum Paul Klee Fellowship in Bern, Switzerland for 2013.
Mayer is the front woman for #PostModem, a performance collaborative that makes meta-pop music based in art/web theory. Their original songs will be used in a feature length musical film that Mayer is writing, directing and producing in collaboration with Lucas Leyva. The satirical film takes place in the future and tackles digital identity and net neutrality. The film extends to software apps, poetry, installations and Internet experiences.
Mayer is represented by David Castillo Gallery.