Erasey Page (2012)
Erasey Page exists as a faux web page and video that allows web users to participate in both the liberating and anxiety-producing experience of “erasing the Internet.”
Mayer acts as a spokesperson inviting users to interact with the web page and follow a series of basic steps that will end the distraction and saturation of identity that is the world’s most powerful and innovative tool.
Created by Jillian Mayer in collaboration with Eric Schoenborn
Click here to erase the Internet
Premiere: Bass Museum of Art, 2012
Essay
Ersaey Page
Essay by Kristin Korolowicz
Erasey Page is a newly commissioned web-based project that Mayer produced in collaboration with computer programmer, designer, and creative technologist Eric Schoenborn, which will be on view in the Bass Museum’s recently renovated project room space. The interactive website begins with a greeting from the artist as a pop-up spokes model who promotes visitors to live an internet-free and happy life by simply deleting the World Wide Web page by page. Participants are then encouraged to type in a web address of their choosing to erase. Afterwards, the spokesperson reappears to thank visitors for making the choice to regain their lives and to enjoy “a less computer interactive and a more real-time reactive lifestyle.”*
*Contemporary culture is profoundly informed by the ways we access, navigate and use information online, which is both celebrated and questioned by the artist. Lying somewhere between a parody of utopian ideals and an infomercial for a self-help product, Erasey Page humorously comments on one’s personal agency. The project becomes particularly poignant in light of recent activism and online blackouts in protest against the U.S. government’s proposed legislation—SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) & PIPA (Project IP Act)—which aims to regulate user-contributed material on the Internet and block entire websites. However, Mayer’s proposition is more directed towards questioning our increasingly virtual lives (via social media, etc.) to playfully imagine a world without the Internet.
-Kristin Korolowicz
Special Projects
About the Artist
Jillian Mayer steeps her artistic practice in the verisimilitude of a generation that came of age in the 1980s. Indebted to the cultural constructions of the sitcoms of her childhood but looking ahead to the infinite implications of the Internet, Mayer uses photography, video, drawing, installation, online platforms and performance to enact scenarios of apathy, dysfunction, and disillusionment and tease out the pathways and pitfalls of postmodern identity formation while considering our increasing integration with the web.
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. Cloaked with humor, fast editing, and pop soundtracks, Mayer's videos are designed for mass appeal but ask big questions about human connection and manufactured realities. Her work lives in, and is activated by, viewer participation.
In 2010, her video Scenic Jogging was one of the 25 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 Family Matters at David Castillo Gallery, Miami (2011), Love Trips at World Class Boxing, Miami (2011), Erasey Page at the Bass Museum of Art (2012), Precipice/PostModem at Locust Projects, Miami (2013) for which the gallery received a Harpo Foundation grant. Currently, Mayer has is the Salt9 artist with a solo show at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts till July 2014. Mayer is currently at work on an artist book to be released by [name] Publications and on a show at the University of Maine Museum of Art.
Her video works and performances have been premiered at galleries and museums internationally and film festivals such as SXSW and Sundance. She was recently featured in Art Papers and in ArtNews discussing identity, Internet and her artistic practices and influences.
Mayer is a recipient of the prestigious South Florida Cultural Consortium's Visual/Media Artists Fellowship 2011, Cintas Foundation Fellowship 2012, and was named one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker Magazine. This year she has been awarded the Elsewhere Museum/NEA Southern Constellation Fellowship, Zentrum Paul Klee Fellowship (Bern, Switzerland) and the Sundance Institute's New Frontier Story Lab Fellowship.
Mayer is the front woman for #PostModem, a performance collaborative that makes meta-pop music based in art/web theory. Their original songs will be used in a feature length musical film that Mayer is writing, directing and producing in collaboration with Lucas Leyva. The satirical film takes place in the future and tackles digital identity and net neutrality. The film extends to software apps, poetry, installations and Internet experiences.
Mayer is represented by David Castillo Gallery.
website: JillianMayer.net
