How a Bottle of Cognac Inspired Jillian Mayer’s Frieze Los Angeles Installation

Presented in partnership with historic cognac house Bisquit & Dubouché at Frieze Los Angeles 2022, Jillian Mayer’s Glass Room is an immersive commission driven by material transformation and exploring an aesthetic of difference and distinction.

In this video, made between the artist’s Miami, Florida backyard studio and the launch of Glass Room at Frieze Los Angeles, Mayer describes her experience translating her first encounter with a bottle of Bisquit & Dubouché cognac into an arena of striking forms and glowing hues. For viewers that enter the space, Mayer says, ‘I hope they are engulfed in a rich colour palette, that makes them sort of feel as if they are in the cognac bottle.’

Drawing on the slow-paced process of firing glass in a kiln, Mayer created a playful array of compositions featuring intersecting fragments and drawings in crystal powder, encased in imperfect metal frames. Suspended in the open in the space at Frieze Los Angeles, the artworks cast shifting light and dynamic shadows across the room, filling negative space. For Mayer, glass is a material of rich complexity – long associated with ideas of the sacred and vulnerable, and simultaneously essential to the phone and computer screens we engage with every day.

‘All glass will always break eventually,’ Mayer notes in the video, ‘I think there’s something beautiful about that.’ An intrepid innovator in her own right, Mayer was chosen to pay tribute to the heritage of rule-breaking and artistic intuition that the Bisquit & Dubouché sees itself rooted in as a Cognac Maison. A sense of experimentation, improvisation and an honesty of form was central to her intentions in Glass Room: ‘a lot of the elements in the room are very literal sketches to me’, Mayer explains, noting her passion for ‘everything to feel like the human handprint was there.’