Nikko Washington’s painting World’s Largest Machine addresses the artist’s feelings towards the prison industrial complex. The figures in the painting are faceless, except for a ghostly image of a face on the orange wall of the prison, and the skull sitting atop a book on a table in the foreground. The work speaks about the private prisons that are profiting from the mass incarceration of Black and Brown men, a practice that increased during the global COVID pandemic. Washington mobilizes this image of a deadened environment, presented almost like a theatrical set, as a means of archiving and contextualizing the present through the lens of mythology and storytelling. “Unfortunately, I have friends in this system,” Washington says. “I thought back to people during the beginning of COVID comparing lockdown to being in jail. It upset me, so I chose to express my feelings through my practice.”