Solo Show >Placeholder Future< at David Castillo Gallery

David Castillo presents Jillian Mayer: Placeholder Future, the artist and filmmaker’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery.

Mayer has spent over a decade examining the possibilities and probabilities of the future, and our ongoing relationship with technology—the way we might physically integrate with it, its potential to liberate the self from utilitarian concerns. Her investigations have revealed that the future, though, never quite arrives; as technology outpaces itself, revolutionary tools becoming artifacts overnight and new advancements threaten to deplete our resources, the need for adaptation continues. Perhaps the future is better understood as an ever-present container for the imagination. In >PLACEHOLDER FUTURE<, Mayer does not “attempt to predict the future,” she writes, “so much as construct an environment for living inside our attempts to imagine it.” Mayer is fascinated by how we continually challenge and acclimatize to our rapidly changing conditions. In her short video “How to Disappear” (2026), she employs the familiar language of social media to provide a humorous how-to on obliterating your digital existence, inspired by her research on prepper culture and survivalism. The materials we interact with the most—glass and aluminum, the building blocks of our cell phones—are transformed into objects both sculptural and utilitarian, and playfully innovative regardless. A sheet of lined notebook paper is made entirely of fused glass (“Transparent Paper,” 2026); a chunky silver chair, constructed with aluminum (“Silla,” 2024), evokes a vision of a home in the outer reaches of space.

And of course it does: Mayer obtained many of the show’s materials from a satellite company forced to downsize due to technological advancements, particularly the growing use of Starlink. Mayer, who is Cuban-American, finds inspiration in Cuba’s Special Period, “when scarcity required people to repair, alter, cannibalize, and reinvent existing technologies,” she says, It’s optimistic to imagine that the future, as it looks from here—collapsing infrastructure, depleted resources, widespread scarcity, AI-induced outages—might, Mayer writes, “contribute to a creative renaissance built around repair, adaptation, reuse, and technological disobedience. Or perhaps the opposite happens. Will bans or outages of resources contribute to our creative renaissance or turn us further into well-kept pets with our own processing skills headed more quickly to atrophy than the human life span on its natural timeline?” If the works here—made of repurposed materials that might’ve once orbited the moon—offer any insight, there is hope for our ingenuity.