SNORRI STURLUSON | LAUNDROMAT
Opening reception: April 13, 2013 | 8 – 11pm
Show runs: April 13 – 27, 2013

Known Gallery
441 North Fairfax Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90036
info@knowngallery.com

“For all its squalor and despair, the laundromat has held a curiously elevated status in the global mind. Things happen in laundromats. People get hurt. People hide. People see God. People fall in love. People go nuts. People make plans. Or so TV and film have led us to believe for the last 40 years. Snorri Sturluson is certainly no exception to the laundromat’s allure. When he moved to New York City in 2001 he was smitten with their charm. It was, Sturluson said, as if everything he’d learned about America over the years had contracted in a brilliant epiphany. The laundromat contains the loneliness and pathos in the films of Jim Jarmusch, the mysterious lack that pervades the prose of Paul Auster, the shade of Weltschmertz in the songs of Tom Waits, and the city’s sense of gritty despair and taunting possibility that have drawn so many millions to it. There were literally thousands of laundromats in New York City. A few photos would be too many, but hundreds hardly enough.

Taken over a period of four years and representing all five of the city’s boroughs, the photographs in Laundromat constitute a portrait in montage. They present, as well, a history, an anthropology, and a sociology, an imagistic commentary on the economics and politics of America itself. Laundromat is an homage, on the one hand, to laundromats and the people who use them, and an elegy, on the other, to an America that used to be.”

“Laundromat” is available as a 160 page photography book from powerHouse Books featuring an essay by D. Foy.