The Wash by Basia Goszczynska

I (unfortunately) get to walk past Port Authority Bus Terminal on a daily basis, and it is a building in desperate need of a facelift at a minimum, though a complete makeover as I believe is in the works. For those not in the know, Port Authority is the bus station for interstate buses in and our of New York City, and is situated right off Times Square.

Port Authority does manage to surprise me with some of the Public Art projects that find their way to it, such as the Jaguar Parade I wrote about recently. There is one that I have been crossing for months on 42nd Street right off 8th Avenue is called The Wash by Basia Goszczynska as a collaboration between ChaShaMa and Port Authority, and I finally took some pictures of it when I saw scaffolding going up on the sidewalk, knowing it would obstruct the piece. You can see the scaffolding starting to take over on the left in the picture below, and the state of the building both below and above the installation.

It looks like a laundromat from a distance, but as you get closer you can see that the 29 photographs feature marine debris that is in each of these portholes, making it a very powerful statement on the prevalence of plastic trash not just in our daily lives, but also in the waters around us.

Here are some of the pictures up close –

The Wash definitely makes me think a little harder about where the plastics that I tend to reach out for will end up once I have finished using them, often just once.

Definitely a thought provoking piece that is helping Port Authority with a little botox, if not yet the facelift it needs.

#gottalovenewyork