We are on the penultimate episode of The exhibition, the reality TV contest run by MTV and Hirshhorn to unearth America’s next great entertainer, which has set a futuristic task for its contestants. This week’s commission asks the seven competing artists to revisit a work they have already created, and to update it or develop it by projecting themselves into the future. You know, it’s kind of like how George Lucas revisited the original star wars 30 years later to add random CGI rocks.
On the contrary, such a memoir invites conceptualization, which means it’s finally time for our resident conceptualist, Jillian Mayer, to shine. Mayer has yet to win a commission for work that has often been great in ideas but weak in executionbut this week, she’s determined to “focus on messing up and getting the idea across.”
Jillian Mayer at work on her installation. Photo: Screenshot of The exhibitionepisode five.
She thinks back to her deeply bizarre video work from 2011, I am your grandmother, in which she showcased an older version of herself leaving behind a “digital legacy” for her grandchildren. In his new piece, that same protagonist rejected that form of technological optimism, swapping it for a grim prep bunker – an “unbalanced” installation that Mayer created as a “complete world-building” with song, streamed via an iPhone, which goes, “Free yourself/Delete yourself.”
Technological terror also runs through Jennifer Warren’s painting, based on an older canvas titled fresh facade, featuring a “free-form exploration of a screaming face”. Her new screaming face, less free and more like a progressive rock album coveraims to express frustration with technology.
“The more we get into the digital world,” she explained, “I think the more people want to get out of it and get back to real life.”
Jennifer Warren at work on her painting. Photo: Screenshot of The exhibitionepisode five.
Meanwhile, Jamaal Barber is evolving his past work, titled big mama, to be less a portrait of mourning and more of celebration. Misha Kahn responds to a clay video he created as a child by transporting these sculptures into virtual reality. His eventual VR collage will be encased in a 3D frame carved out of sponge, which takes up so much production time that he had to recruit Warren and Barber to help add the final painterly touches to the canvas itself.
Other works, however, don’t quite answer the prompt so significantly. Frank Buffalo Hyde revisits his 2011 painting, We don’t pray like them, which juxtaposed Native American dancers with tech toys, simply doing a similar painting with newer tech toys. Clare Khambu expands on her older work, a painting titled Exitwith an installation of painted circles and cutouts of circles intended to encourage viewers to “note the passage of time”.
Detail of Baseera Khan Painful arch, shoulder (2023). Photo: Screenshot from The Exhibit, episode five.
Baseera Khan creates a mixed media work to depict flesh-like material crushed between two plexiglass panes, a material she draws from her previous installation, air duct. The sculpture captures her struggles with a growing cyst in her left ovary and her feeling of being “pushed against a wall”, which is a brave undertaking, but doesn’t really meet the brief.
So come on, Mayer has this one locked. The judging panel — this week made up of series judge Melissa Chiu, linebacker-turned-art collector Keith Rivers, and artists Kenny Schachter and Abigail DeVille — gives marks to Kahn’s artwork (“He brought it all together,” said Chiu) and Barber (whose canvas “gives us optimism for the future”, according to DeVille). But it’s Mayer’s intricate setup that wins the episode.
Jillian Mayer, Untitled (2023). Photo: Screenshot of The exhibitionepisode five.
“Every time you come back to this job, you find something new,” Chiu said.
“Contemporary art is a reflection of our social, political and economic times,” Schachter told Mayer, “and in that sense you have made a perfect expression of the moment we find ourselves in with a view toward tomorrow.”
Do the judges finally grasp the “ambience” she tries to create in her projects? Mayer hopes so, “especially since I’ve done the ugliest job of anyone.” She added: “My work was crazy. It was chaos. Or maybe, it looks like the future.
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