Pergola Spolia extends Jillian Mayer’s long-term exploration of posture, built form, and obsolescence, an evolution of her celebrated SLUMPIES series, which offered slouching, body-responsive sculptures designed for the “post-internet body.” Here, Mayer scales up that dialogue between comfort and collapse into a large-scale, modular architectural system. Built from concrete, rebar, and metal mesh, the pergola is both skeletal and sheltering: handles, joints, and exposed armatures announce its awareness that it will be moved, reinstalled, and reinterpreted across time and geography. This embrace of impermanence, of structures that never settle into a single, finished state, anchors Pergola Spolia within Mayer’s critique of polished, “render-perfect” design culture. Instead of presenting stability, the work performs entropy, adaptability, and the soft chaos of lived use.

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Conceived in dialogue with two architectural ghosts, Louise Nevelson’s Dawn’s Forest, rescued from a demolished building, and Florida’s iconic Cape Romano Dome House, a futuristic concrete dwelling that slowly surrendered to the Gulf before finally disappearing—Mayer engages spolia as both technique and philosophy: survival through recombination. In doing so, she offers a playful nod to Object-Oriented Ontology. If post-internet culture destabilized the hierarchy between online and offline life, OOO further destabilizes the hierarchy between humans and objects—suggesting that materials, tools, and things possess their own trajectories and stubborn agency. Mayer positions Pergola Spolia at this intersection: a structure that behaves with a kind of object-will, slumping, shifting, weathering, and accumulating meaning independently from any narrative imposed on it. The work treats concrete, rebar, and even decay as collaborators rather than inert matter, aligning with her larger post-internet project of questioning what remains “in control” when bodies, technologies, and environments constantly reshape one another.

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