by Jonathan Bruce Williams
Department of Transformation is pleased to present Consciousness Energy Grid, a new series of wall-mounted lightbox sculptures by artist Jonathan Bruce Williams. On view for the first time, Williams’ six resin lightbox sculptures generate layered fields of image, movement, and light that elicit somatic responses and invite altered states of consciousness.
Embedded within a bespoke architectural installation consisting of a spiraling series of floating wall fragments, each of Williams’ lightbox works greets its viewer with a graphic layer rendered in resin: colorful image collages combining original digital illustration with abstracted fragments of technical diagrams, instructional manuals, and other found imagery. Collectively, they examine the human form across various states of vulnerability, collapse, disintegration, and absence. William’s drawings on the transparent resin lightbox surface are superimposed atop animated fields of soft blue, green, pink, and purple LED lights. Through their rhythms and pulsations, the lights consciously evoke manners of breathing as well as internal bodily movements and out-of-body experiences. The interplay of illustration, illumination, and animation coalesce in these dynamic, mysterious image-objects that meditate on the many valences of embodied transformation.
Informed by the history of “The Gateway Process,” a top-secret experimental research project conducted by the CIA in the 1980s to explore consciousness expansion and psychic phenomena, Consciousness Energy Grid lives in the tension between the scientific and the subjective. The so-called “hard problem of consciousness”—a term coined by philosopher David Chalmers—asks why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience. While neuroscience can map brain activity, it cannot explain feelings of being, of seeing, of knowing. In a world increasingly driven by data, metrics, and systems of surveillance and control, subjective experience is disregarded as irrational, unquantifiable, and therefore disposable. But consciousness, with all its contradictions and opacity, is also the site of agency, imagination, and resistance. Consciousness Energy Grid attempts to reclaim this territory, positing an inner world not as a fringe concern but as a site of radical possibility, a field where perception, time, memory, and identity are fluid, where observed reality and mystical experience meet.
To make an appointment to view the exhibition, please email hello@d-o-t.nyc
Jonathan Bruce Williams is a Lower East Side-based artist and technologist who creates art systems at an intersection of research, imagination, and light. His work explores perception, psychology, and technology through custom-designed apparatuses aimed at healing. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Currently, he is training to become a 200-hour Yoga Alliance certified instructor, focusing on Ashtanga and Vinyasa, integrating movement and mindfulness into his creative approach.
Department of Transformation and Jonathan Bruce Williams: Consciousness Energy Grid are generously supported by the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center.
