Jillian Mayer is a Cuban-American artist and filmmaker, based in Miami, whose work explores technology’s impact on our identities and experiences and has been displayed in several museums around the world. Her influences extend from surrealism to the Dada art movement, and from novelist Kurt Vonnegut to the sweeping technology of our generation. And she also invented the Slumpie (more on that below).
Reading the books of Google AI scientist Ray Kurzweil, Mayer was drawn to the idea of the soul’s digitization. The average person in the U.S. now spends nearly five hours on their phone each day, and Jillian asked herself, “Who am I more: the person I am in my physical life, or the avatar representation of me online?”
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She wanted to reconcile her desires to use technology and celebrate art — and thus were born the Slumpies, a sculpture series that function as chairs, but with armatures to support the user’s arm holding their phone. Mayer has even installed charging cords and Wi-Fi in some pieces, and some can float. The series is a solution for the contemporary issue of poor posture as a result of phone dependence, while at the same time calling attention to the ways we contort our bodies to fit around our phones and make them our centerpieces.
The Slumpies also play with the idea of planned obsolescence. As Jillian says, designers in market-led economies are often favored if they make great technology that breaks down within two years.
“I wanted to make a work that self-consciously was art but is also double laced with a responsibility, like a reversible jacket,” she says. “Eventually that gesture of the phone being held up will become obsolete, and then the Slumpies will get to be just art. They’ll just get to exist.”
Her latest sculpture in the series will be on display at MASS MoCA, in North Adams, MA, in spring 2025. She is beginning to work with bronze, aluminum, glass and metals, to represent permanence in a way she hasn’t explored before. Her vision is eclectic — she once did a makeup tutorial video retaliating against facial recognition tech.
And with a painting series incorporating fused glass, Jillian represents how we experience life not in reality but through glass of all kinds.
Most recently, to combat the shortage of art studios in Miami, she founded City States, an expanding zone for artists in the area. The woman has energy!
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