Admit, Emit at Adjunct Positions, Los Angeles
September 23 - November 10, 2018
For the exhibition, Mayer presents new sculptures in ceramic, plaster, steel, and fire. With special attention to the unique architecture of Adjunct Positions, where two exhibition spaces are stacked on top of each other, Admit, Emit highlights the various ways in which Mayer produces heat--from within her own body and through sculpture and ceramic processes. The gallery's structure frames Mayer's ongoing engagement with burial practices and the excavation of consciousness.
Mayer has produced two portable kiln sculptures for the gallery's garage. Their decorative patterns bring together Victorian mourning practices and present-day destruction by fire. Vessels that house creation and incineration, each kiln is artwork and tool. Keeping them company are photographic self portraits that reveal Mayer's movement between dull(ed) and flush(ed). Her overt self display is with a high degree of vulgarity. She insists on limelight. Her grief reflects losses local and global.
We are devastated by heat. It obliterates. She steams. Emit.
Two branched ceramic sculptures from Mayer's Utteruent series will be fired in the kilns and then covered with lime plaster inside and out. At the conclusion of the show they will be buried on site. The lime will intensify the alkaline Southern California soil, effectively preventing any growth in the garden above the sculptures indefinitely. If life gives you lime, make nothing!
