Oct 07 2021
Artist Talk: Jillian Mayer

Artist Talk: Jillian Mayer

Presented by Crisp-Ellert Art Museum at Flagler College at Flagler College - Flagler Room

Jillian will be on campus from October 4 – 15 conducting research and making work for her forthcoming exhibition in January 2022. Please join the Crisp-Ellert for an artist talk on Thursday, October 7 at 6 PM in the Flagler Room.

Through videos, sculptures, online experiences, photography, performances, and installations, Mayer explores how technology affects our lives, bodies, and identities by processing how our physical world and bodies are impacted and reshaped by our participation in a digital landscape. Mayer investigates the points of tension between our online and physical worlds and makes work that attempts to inhabit the increasingly porous boundary between the two. Mayer's artwork has a consistent thread of modeling how to subvert capital-driven modes of technological innovation.

This emphasis on our complicated and often over consumptive relationship to technology also seeps into the artist’s more recent growing interest in prepper and survivalist subcultures. Mayer grew up in Miami in the 1980s, the epitome of overdevelopment and lavish excess. This drive for more and more growth has led to the current moment in which environmental and infrastructural collapse plays out in real-time. It also serves as a backdrop to much of Mayer’s recent work, in which she proposes how “humans might discover new ways to adapt to the natural world.” In one ongoing large-scale project, Mayer has created an off-the-grid itinerant artist residency housed in a trailer, outfitted with solar panels. Her 2019 installation Bunker Mood Board (2019) at the Bemis Center presents us with a vision of how the Instagram/Pinterest generation might find refuge in a tastefully decorated underground bunker. Mayer’s work draws us in with playfulness and humor, while simultaneously forewarning the disasters that threaten our precarious future.

The CEAM Artist Residency is supported by a grant from the Dr. JoAnn Crisp-Ellert Fund at The Community Foundation for Northeast Florida.

Admission Info

Free Admission

Email: crispellert@flagler.edu

Dates & Times

2021/10/07 - 2021/10/07

Location Info

Flagler College - Flagler Room

74 King Street, St. Augustine, FL 32084