Placeholder Future

Artist and filmmaker Jillian Mayer examines technology, scarcity and adaptation through sculpture, video and installation at David Castillo Gallery in the Miami Design District. The exhibition opens Thursday, September 3, and remains on view through October 1, marking Mayer’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery.

In Placeholder Future, Mayer considers the future less as a fixed destination than as a space shaped by imagination, technological change and the need to adapt. Works include the short video How to Disappear (2026), which uses the language of social media to explore digital erasure, alongside sculptures made from glass, aluminum and repurposed technological materials.

Mayer’s practice focuses on the increasingly porous boundary between digital and physical life and the ways technology reshapes bodies, identities and everyday behavior. Drawing in part on Cuba’s Special Period and its culture of repair and reuse, the exhibition considers whether scarcity and technological disruption might foster new forms of ingenuity, adaptation and creative resistance. Mayer is a recipient of the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship, along with fellowships from Creative Capital and the Cintas Foundation.