Jonathan Bruce Williams
Uhhhh this is your captain speaking, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but we’re having a bit of a problem up here controlling your reality, we’ve been trying to get a better hold on the situation but, uhhhhh yeah, [inaudible] we’re all gonna have to evacuate, if you could please take a look at the seatback in front of you for instructions, and if everyone could please try to keep calm and carry on, in an orderly fashion, that way we’ll be sure to get through this thing, together, [inaudible] uhhhhmmmm, Let’s All Abandon Reality Together, please stay calm, thank you for flying with us, uhhhhh, namaste…
[end of transmission]
Kai Matsumiya and Department of Transformation (D🌎T) present Let’s All Abandon Reality Together, the debut solo exhibition of New York–based artist and technologist Jonathan Bruce Williams, on view at 264 Canal street from September 12th through October 25th, 2025.
Following D🌍T’s pop-up presentation of Jonathan Bruce Williams: Consciousness Energy Grid at The Clemente in May of this year, Let’s All Abandon Reality Together unfolds across a series of algorithmically-produced, animated light box sculptures. The works emerge from the artist’s intensive development of a custom art-making workflow spanning software, design, manufacturing, and installation. Backlit by a hypnotic LED glow, Williams’ esoteric image-objects pulse with saturated, synthetic light, recalling therapeutic devices used to treat Seasonal Affective Disorder. These illuminated images operate as anti-depressants against a deeper malaise: the dimming of shared consensus in an era of social, informational, and perceptual disillusion.
Distributed across two galleries at Kai Matsumiya, Williams’ works proceed from fully abstract optical compositions to still lifes, culminating in a signature series of pop-inflected text and image collages that combine found imagery with original illustrations. These works feature a motley cast of characters—Patty Hearst, the Doomsday Clock, The Terminator—who play out the collective melodrama of our contemporary unravelling. A disorienting visual choreography that oscillates between earnest phenomenological inquiry and darkly dystopic irony, Let’s All Abandon Reality Together meditates on the power of nostalgia, spectacle, and embodied experience as both tools of psychological manipulation and methods for transformation.
A central work, Move 37, endlessly iterates John Conway's Game of Life (1970) behind a Go board depicting the 37th move played by Google’s AlphaGo against Lee Sedol in 2016. Initially dismissed as an error, the move proved decisive—a turning point in the history of artificial intelligence. In Williams’ hands, it becomes a conceptual fulcrum: an infinite loop where the match is no longer between man and machine but between collapsing worldviews—logic versus intuition, pattern recognition versus unpredictability, control dissolving into surrender. Framed by schematic drawings of human and robotic figures, the flickering board becomes an unstable arena, a haunted matrix of digital aberration.
Both cheerful in tone and sinister in its implication, Let’s All Abandon Reality Together echoes the seductive cadence of a propaganda slogan, a parodic call to action that reveals our complicity in a mass withdrawal from truth. Like effective propaganda, the phrase cloaks coercion in the language of choice, transforming alienation into a collective aesthetic experience. Yet Williams’ glowing tableaux also speculate on the reparative potential of refusal, inviting viewers to abandon a manipulated reality that no longer sustains shared understanding. Together, these works form an ersatz mythology, a pantheon of shifting, color-changing ghosts—spectres of psychological liberation.
In parallel with the exhibition, D🌎T will host a series of public programs at the gallery. Designed to foster connection, these gatherings include a guided mindfulness session, a breath-work and creative practice class, an experimental reading group, and a youth-focused workshop envisioning speculative futures. These programs will be announced at the start of September.
Thank you for flying with us. Let’s all Abandon Reality Together.
