GLASS PLAINS, 2023

Mayer meditates on the state of the present as a landscape that is created, transmitted, and understood through lenses and screens. Glass emerges as the predominant vernacular material from which these filters are made, serving as an invisible but no less present partition that both separates us from reality and mediates how it is seen. As a substance that facilitates forms of vision, glass often bears complex cultural meanings linked to concepts of clarity and truth, and can give credence—whether merited or not—to information envisioned through its medium; these associations can be instrumentalized to further blur the divide between fact and fabrication, one of the defining issues of the current moment. 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. 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.