SALT LAKE CITY, UT.- Reality, virtuality, and the nebulous line between them—artist Jillian Mayer’s new exhibition at the
Utah Museum of Fine Arts investigates postmodern identity with the visual language of the media her work interrogates. salt 9: Jillian Mayer, the ninth installment of the UMFA’s salt series of exhibitions by emerging international contemporary artists, opened Friday, January 17.
A Miami-based artist whose work has appeared twice in the Sundance Film Festival, Mayer uses photography, video, drawing, installation, and performance to explore humans’ increasing integration with the Web and the complications of personal identity formation in a digital world. salt 9, her first solo exhibition in a museum, presents new work made specifically for this show.
“Jillian’s work is designed for mass appeal but asks big questions about human connection and manufactured realities,” says Whitney Tassie, curator of modern and contemporary art. “She investigates the (im)possibility of authenticity and the multiplicity of authorship by co-opting the visual language and tools of Google, online chat boards, and viral videos. A child of the eighties, she’s indebted to the cultural constructions of the sitcoms of that era, but her work looks ahead to the Internet’s infinite implications.”
In 2010 Mayer’s video Scenic Jogging was one of twenty-five selections for the Guggenheim’s YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video and was exhibited at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain; and Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany. Recent solo projects include Love Trips at World Class Boxing, Miami (2011) and Precipice/PostModem at Locust Projects, Miami (2013). Mayer premiered short films at the 2012 and 2013 Sundance Film Festival and participated in the Sundance Institute’s 2013 New Frontier Story Lab. Also in 2013 Mayer was in residency in Berne, Switzerland, as a Zentrum Paul Klee Fellow and in Greensboro, North Carolina, as an NEA Southern Constellation Fellow.
