Transformer is thrilled to present Interactive Echo Chamber, a multi-media exhibition by DC based multi-disciplinary artist Ashley Jaye Williams (they/them). This installation stages a lived experiment in participation and consent within the attention economy. Visitors first encounter a clearly lit, curved painted surface that reads like a conventional artwork. A timed audio cue and projection sequence then transforms that field into a moving, expanding image that spills into the gallery, shifting the viewer from observer to participant. The work weaves together Plato's cave, Foucault's panopticon, and the algorithmic logic of TikTok's FYP to examine how media shapes perception and behavior. By foregrounding the mechanics of projection, capture, and amplification, the piece asks a single urgent question: what changes when you become the same machine that keeps you imprisoned? The result is a space that invites both embodied discomfort and critical reflection.

Download additional exhibition notes from the artist here.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Ashley Jaye Williams explores defiance and otherness resulting from the dissonance of modern life, gender, and technology. They create complex narratives that expand and explore individuals who have been marginalized and flattened by society. Their work challenges the conflict that arises when one is forced to conform to false, technologically influenced versions of themselves. Williams’s work constructs alternative realities that go beyond societal limitations and reject the objectification they have experienced as a femme presenting person.

ARTIST BIO:

Ashley Jaye Williams is a multidisciplinary artist who has been working and living in Washington, DC since 2008. They work primarily with fine art, murals, sculpture and art installations, but also have experience in video, performance art, fashion, and printmaking. Williams has created art for Google, the Women’s March, DC Public Schools, Commission for the Arts & Humanities, Broccoli City music festival, the Annual Roots Picnic, Long Live Go-Go, The Rounds, District Department of Transportation, DC Vote, Made in NYC, WeWork, QAIC, Halcyon, the Waldorf Astoria, NextFest DC, Arena Arts Social Club, PUSH Empowered Pregnancy, Songbyrd, the Willard Intercontinental Hotel, and Culture House. In 2020, Williams was commissioned by Ms. Magazine to create a painting for the cover of their 50th anniversary issue. They have created live paintings and their artwork has been featured on multiple covers of the Washington City Paper. The artist has exhibited work at Homme Gallery, the Phillips Collection, Target Gallery at Torpedo Factory, Gallery Y at YMCA Anthony Bowen, Tiny Art Gallery NYC, the Commission on the Arts & Humanities Gallery, and numerous others. They have shown in group exhibitions curated by Monochrome Collective, Latela Curatorial, Transformer Gallery, Sycamore Oak, Petworth Arts Collaborative, Fitsum Shebeshe, VisArts Center, No Kings Collective and was commissioned to create a live painting for the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art. Williams is also the recipient of a Wherewithal Grant from the Washington Project for the Arts with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. They have received grant funding from the Commission of Arts and Humanities in 2020-2025 and has had numerous artworks considered as finalists for the CAH Art Bank Collection. In Fall 2022, Williams was commissioned to create a 900 square foot painted textile installation by PUSH Empowered Pregnancy that was installed on the National Mall in Washington, DC. In 2022 they were also chosen by the Qatar America Institute for Culture as an artist delegate by QAIC in Doha Qatar and visited Beijing, China in 2008 as a fine art international scholarship recipient. In 2025 Williams received a curatorial grant to curate the annual Queer Art Salon group exhibition (QAS was co-founded with gallerist and curator Abbey Alison McClain) for its third year at the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities gallery in conjunction with World Pride.