Each year, the Baker Museum invites three Florida artists to exhibit work in its “Florida Contemporary” show. This year, it included a fourth: Lillian Mayer, a sculptor, performance and video artist from Miami.
According to Chief Curator Courtney McNeil, “Her ‘Slumpies’ are her rather sardonic commentary on the ubiquity of technology in today's world. She noticed that when you go out in the world today, you see people slumped over their phone and scrolling obsessively on these tiny windows to the internet rather than engaging with the world at large. So she thought, well, why not lean into that by creating sculpture designed to be slumped on as you stare obsessively at your phone.”
When McNeil and her team suggested she display her Slumpies in the Norris Garden, Mayer decided to come see the space for herself.
“She realized how big it was and decided to think bigger than she ever had before and created this pergola-like work titled ‘Pergola Spolia,’ with spolia being an architectural term for a work of architecture constructed of fragments of existing buildings or existing architectural elements.”
In addition to “Pergola Spolia,” Mayer brought five of her interactive Slumpies to the Norris Garden.
“It's really fun to be able to have functional artwork in here,” McNeil said. “It's been wonderful seeing kids interacting with them, sitting on them, and enjoying them.”
In addition to Jillian Mayer’s Slumpies, the Norris Garden is also home to Dale Chihuly’s “Red Reeds” and the Paley Gates.
Florida Contemporary is on view through June 28.
MORE INFORMATION:
Jillian Mayer is an artist and filmmaker.
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.
Her “Slumpies” are also currently on view through Aug. 19 at the Sarasota Art Museum.
Mayer's solo exhibitions include Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, Nebraska (2019); Kunst Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark (2019); University of Buffalo Art Museum, Buffalo New York (2018); Tufts University, Boston, Massachusetts (2018); Postmasters Gallery, New York, New York (2018); Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2016); LAXART, Los Angeles (2016); Utah Museum of Fine Art, Salt Lake City (2014); and David Castillo Gallery, Miami (2011 & 2016).
She has exhibited, screened films, and performed atMoMA PS1 (2017); MoMA (2013); the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2013); the Bass Museum of Art, North Miami (2012); the Guggenheim Museum (2010); and the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal, Québec, as a part of the Montréal Biennial (2014).
Mayer’s work has been featured in Artforum, Art Papers, Art in America, ArtNews, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times. Mayer is a recipient of the Creative Capital Fellowship, South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual/Media Artists Fellowship, Cintas Foundation Fellowship for Cuban Artists, and was named one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” by Filmmaker Magazine.
She has lectured at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, CalArts, the Sundance Institute, ICA Miami, Carnegie Mellon University, Otis College of Art & Design, Tufts University, Salt Lake Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, University of Texas Arlington, McCord Museum, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, SXSW, Portland State University, Museum of Fine Arts St. Pete, Pitzer University, MoCA North Miami and more.
“She's amazing,” McNeil stated.
Regarding “Pergola Spolia,” McNeil observed that it is Mayer’s “first foray into working in concrete for an outdoor sculpture rather than the foam-type sculptures that she more traditionally did.”
Pergola Spolia extends Jillian Mayer’s long-term exploration of posture, built form, and obsolescence, an evolution.
“Here, Mayer scales up that dialogue between comfort and collapse into a large-scale, modular architectural system,” states the artist on her website. “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.”
“She intentionally left these sorts of handles you see on the top of rebar exposed because this is a temporary site-specific installation and someday these objects will be somewhere else in some other home,” McNeil explained. “She really likes this idea of impermanence, and by leaving that handle visible, it invites you to think about the works being picked up and transported and exhibited somewhere else.”
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.
The piece, Mayer’s website continues, was 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,” the website continues. “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.”
McNeil expanded upon this theme.
“She also thinks about them as relics of another time. Fast-forwarding to a time when we no longer have our little phones, when perhaps we have what, computer chips planted in our brains or we have glasses that give us all of our information, and the idea of furniture designed for you to slump on your phone will be incredibly antiquated and no longer relevant to today's society. So she's also thinking about these as from that perspective of the future.”
Throughout the work, Mayer integrates seating and resting zones, folding bodily gesture and interactivity into the architectural frame. Like her “Slumpies,” “Pergola Spolia” invites viewers to recline, gather, or linger, but now at a collective scale, transforming the sculpture into a semi-functional pavilion shaped by weather, touch, time, and circumstance.
“Its watercolor-inspired surfaces draw from Mayer’s sketching practice, translating fluid marks into hardened form and rendering concrete as a kind of painting in space,” the artist’s website concludes. “By merging the immediacy of her studio drawings with the raw pragmatism of industrial materials, Mayer situates ‘Pergola Spolia’ within a lineage of artists, Franz West, Jean Dubuffet, Niki de Saint Phalle, Katharina Grosse, Sterling Ruby, who blur distinctions between sculpture, architecture, environment, and performance. Both ruin and refuge, the pergola resists final form. It shifts with each site, each audience, each season. In this ongoing metamorphosis, Mayer locates a radical tenderness: an insistence that even the most industrial materials can bend, slump, meander, and breathe on their own terms, an object-driven poetics emerging from a post-internet world.”
For more information, visit https://www.jillianmayer.net/pergola-spoila-2025.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
