EXPERIMENTAL ARTIST, WASHMACHINE, TURNS
ALPHABET CITY PROJECT SPACE INTO A FUTURIST LAUNDROMAT
“It’s A Dirty Job, But Someone Has To Do It”
UltraViolet Project Space presents CLEAN BREAK, an immersive exhibit of a new multichannel video projection installation with collages and drawings, paying homage to iconic New York City laundromats.
In this solo exhibition featuring a public video projection in the gallery storefront window, artist Jimi Pantalon, aka WashMachine, explores the intricate interplay between the tendrils of advertising control, the enigmatic pull of media’s influence, and the grounding nature of a community experience.
Laundromats are public spaces to which we bring our private belongings. Clean Break explores the laundromat as a metaphor of our interactions with social media, the blurring of public and private, and tracing the evolution of communication technology from assistance to dominance. Expanding upon WashMachine’s collage series entitled “Phoneless Cords”, this multi-media laundromat confronts our complex connections to our modern devices.
“At the dawn of the internet we asked ourselves if the world wide web is shrinking the globe or expanding it. Today we wonder if virtual reality is in fact entirely replacing the real world.”
Early household appliances had clear functions and were seen to work for us, they were “automatic for the people” yet in our modern world it is us who work on the computers, living “automatic for the machine.” We give away our data to be harvested as our existence is commodified for surveillance capitalism. WashMachine asserts, “We need to make a clean break from the vicious cycle of profit over people.”
ABOUT WASHMACHINE
Jimi Pantalon aka “WashMachine” is a native New York artist creating experimental films and video installations for over two decades. By regenerating cultural artifacts and historical events alongside his own dream-inspired scenes, WashMachine art inhabits a world of visual poetry combining handmade collage and video projection. Conjuring dynamic images in a dance of chance operations, WashMachine creates socio-political artwork exploring the ways the human brain makes associations. Society’s troubled “Media Diet” is a central theme in the long history of WashMachine art and activism where the negative realities of our hyper-mediated world of profit over people collide with the undeniable transformative potential for media and the creative experience.
On View from Sept. 22nd – Oct. 31st, Opening reception on Sept. 29th. 6-10pm
Live performances by WashMachine w/ special guests on October 14th and October 28th.
Gallery open by appointment.
