salt 9: Jillian Mayer
Utah Museum of Fine Art
January 17- August 17, 2014
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) is pleased to present the first museum exhibition of Jillian Mayer’s work in its ninth installment of the Museum’s exhibition series introducing new and innovative art from around the world. salt 9: Jillian Mayer will present new photographic, video, installation, and Internet art made by the artist specifically for exhibition at the UMFA.
Engaging the ubiquitous selfie, duping Google Image, or subverting facial recognition software, Mayer’s newest body of work tosses aside the physical body to investigate modern identity formation online. Identity, online and IRL, is a fluid performance of multiple selves in constant construction, but online there is no place, need, or value for the real body. The mind, untethered by physical limits, can be free in its construction of identity.
While presenting tools to maintain online identities, Mayer exposes moments when the virtual world defines the physical world, creating an alternate reality. In salt 9 Mayer sets up scenarios, often using her own image, that bring attention to how Web 2.0′s architecture of participation is changing perceptions of truth and privacy as well as authorship and authenticity. By accepting the web’s uncontrollable context and by being open to malleable meaning, Mayer enlists an ever-expanding audience of collaborators and challenges the traditional artist/viewer relationship. Viewers become participants, collaborators, even active creators of content and meaning. Since Mayer uploaded her vlog I Am Your Grandma to YouTube.com in 2011, the bizarre one-minute video message to her future, unborn grandchild has received an ever-growing 2,553,850 views, 22,163 likes, 1,667 dislikes, and 7,310 viewer comments. Moreover, the YouTube post has spawned countless spoofs, including choreographed dances and remakes by five-year olds, an Internet troll, college students, Darth Vader, a fake plastic cat, Wes Borland, and a Cabbage Patch Kid.
But what does it mean to leave a timeless video message on YouTube for your unborn grandchild? To upload your soul to the Internet? To display all the world’s selfies on one website? Cloaked with commercial rhetoric and poppy soundtracks, Mayer’s short films, vlogs, and websites are designed for mass appeal but ask serious questions about human connection through and with the Internet. Like the hotly contested New Aesthetic, Mayer’s work illuminates an emergent worldview resultant from our increasing integration with digital technology and the World Wide Web.
