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<\/p>\nEach year, the Baker Museum invites three Florida artists to exhibit work in its \u201cFlorida Contemporary\u201d show. This year, it included a fourth: Lillian Mayer, a sculptor, performance and video artist from Miami.
According to Chief Curator Courtney McNeil, \u201cHer \u2018Slumpies\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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WGCU Arts Reporter Tom Hall <\/p>\n
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WGCU Arts Reporter Tom Hall <\/p>\n
Slumpies in Norris Garden outside the Baker Museum with Dale Chihuly’s ‘Red Reeds’ in background<\/p>\n
When McNeil and her team suggested she display her Slumpies in the Norris Garden, Mayer decided to come see the space for herself.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe realized how big it was and decided to think bigger than she ever had before and created this pergola-like work titled \u2018Pergola Spolia,\u2019 with spolia being an architectural term for a work of architecture constructed of fragments of existing buildings or existing architectural elements.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to \u201cPergola Spolia,\u201d Mayer brought five of her interactive Slumpies to the Norris Garden.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s really fun to be able to have functional artwork in here,\u201d McNeil said. \u201cIt’s been wonderful seeing kids interacting with them, sitting on them, and enjoying them.\u201d
In addition to Jillian Mayer\u2019s Slumpies, the Norris Garden is also home to Dale Chihuly\u2019s \u201cRed Reeds\u201d and the Paley Gates.<\/p>\n
Florida Contemporary is on view through June 28.<\/p>\n
![\"Jillian](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1768950668_918_.jpeg\"\/)
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WGCU Arts Reporter Tom Hall <\/p>\n
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WGCU Arts Reporter Tom Hall <\/p>\n
Jillian Mayer’s ‘Pergola Spolia’ and Slumpies pictured at far end of Norris Garden beyond Dale Chihuly’s ‘Red Reeds’ <\/p>\n
MORE INFORMATION:<\/p>\n
Jillian Mayer is an artist and filmmaker.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Her \u201cSlumpies\u201d are also currently on view through Aug. 19 at the Sarasota Art Museum.<\/p>\n
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); P\u00e9rez Art Museum, Miami (2016); LAXART, Los Angeles (2016); Utah Museum of Fine Art, Salt Lake City (2014); and David Castillo Gallery, Miami (2011 & 2016).<\/p>\n
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 Mus\u00e9e d’Art Contemporain de Montr\u00e9al, Qu\u00e9bec, as a part of the Montr\u00e9al Biennial (2014).<\/p>\n
Mayer\u2019s 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 \u201c25 New Faces of Independent Film,\u201d by Filmmaker Magazine.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe’s amazing,\u201d McNeil stated.<\/p>\n
Regarding \u201cPergola Spolia,\u201d McNeil observed that it is Mayer\u2019s \u201cfirst foray into working in concrete for an outdoor sculpture rather than the foam-type sculptures that she more traditionally did.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"'Pergola](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1768950668_418_.jpeg\"\/)
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Courtesy of Jillian Mayer<\/p>\n
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Jillian Mayer website<\/p>\n
‘Pergola Spolia’ extends Jillian Mayer\u2019s long-term exploration of posture, built form, and obsolescence, an evolution.<\/p>\n
Pergola Spolia extends Jillian Mayer\u2019s long-term exploration of posture, built form, and obsolescence, an evolution.<\/p>\n
\u201cHere, Mayer scales up that dialogue between comfort and collapse into a large-scale, modular architectural system,\u201d states the artist on her website. \u201cBuilt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe 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,\u201d McNeil explained. \u201cShe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Courtesy of Jillian Mayer<\/p>\n
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Jillian Mayer website<\/p>\n
Mayer engages spolia as both technique and philosophy: survival through recombination.<\/p>\n
This embrace of impermanence, of structures that never settle into a single, finished state, anchors \u201cPergola Spolia\u201d within Mayer\u2019s critique of polished, “render-perfect” design culture. Instead of presenting stability, the work performs entropy, adaptability, and the soft chaos of lived use.<\/p>\n
The piece, Mayer\u2019s website continues, was conceived in dialogue with two architectural ghosts: \u201cLouise Nevelson\u2019s \u2018Dawn\u2019s Forest,\u2019 rescued from a demolished building, and Florida\u2019s iconic Cape Romano Dome House, a futuristic concrete dwelling that slowly surrendered to the Gulf before finally disappearing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mayer engages spolia as both technique and philosophy: survival through recombination.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn doing so, she offers a playful nod to Object-Oriented Ontology,\u201d the website continues. \u201cIf post-internet culture destabilized the hierarchy between online and offline life, OOO further destabilizes the hierarchy between humans and objects\u2014suggesting that materials, tools, and things possess their own trajectories and stubborn agency. Mayer positions \u2018Pergola Spolia\u2019 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 \u201cin control\u201d when bodies, technologies, and environments constantly reshape one another.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"'Pergola](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1768950669_329_.jpeg\"\/)
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WGCU Arts Reporter Tom Hall <\/p>\n
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WGCU Arts Reporter Tom Hall <\/p>\n
Throughout the work, Mayer integrates seating and resting zones, folding bodily gesture and interactivity into the architectural frame.<\/p>\n
McNeil expanded upon this theme.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Throughout the work, Mayer integrates seating and resting zones, folding bodily gesture and interactivity into the architectural frame. Like her \u201cSlumpies,\u201d \u201cPergola Spolia\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIts watercolor-inspired surfaces draw from Mayer\u2019s sketching practice, translating fluid marks into hardened form and rendering concrete as a kind of painting in space,\u201d the artist\u2019s website concludes. \u201cBy merging the immediacy of her studio drawings with the raw pragmatism of industrial materials, Mayer situates \u2018Pergola Spolia\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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WGCU Arts Reporter Tom Hall <\/p>\n
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WGCU Arts Reporter Tom Hall <\/p>\n
‘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. <\/p>\n