Persons Unknown is pleased to present  Hell or High Water showcasing the work of artists Josh Short and Dylan Ricards as they rummage through the muck of modernity.  

Artists Josh Short and Dylan Ricards build worlds from the cast off wreckage of our modern world. Through the assemblage of found objects and sounds these artists take the viewer on a ride into altered spaces, proposing new worlds built from creative intuition, the waste stream and healthy dose of experimentation. The exhibit offers endless discovery through the interplay of sound and sculpture. 

Born from a place of seeing and mourning, Vanessa Mayoraz and Ashton Phillips engage in a visible and overlapping consideration of present day realities through color, sound, video, sculpture, and vivid imagery. When logic and fact aren’t enough to shift the tide of oppressive contemporary materialities and power structures, they each turn to poetry and abstraction as a way to speak and respond. Using the gallery space of Persons Unknown to create text and conversation through installation, Lord of the Butterflies questions and examines the fragility of human structures and systems and instead invests in the creation of poetic ecosystems, embracing pressure as a generative force. Through this communal space Mayoraz and Phillips invite the viewer to participate in their simultaneous contemplation and lean into the speculative unfoldings between grief and hope.

Persons Unknown is pleased to present Play Me, opening February 14th. Referencing arcade logic, seductive interfaces, and reward systems, Play Me frames desire as something to be navigated, earned, dispensed. Viewers encounter a choreography of control that mirrors the games we cannot opt out of—where attention functions as currency and intimacy is structured by design. Mathilda LaZelle’s sculptural joystick operates as both symbol and interface, navigating femme commodification and digital dissociation, while Kayla Tange positions the audience beneath a watching body, emphasizing asymmetries of power and sustained observation. By invitation and command, Play Me reclaims control from the circuits that commodify pleasure, turning the performer, the watcher, and the machine into co-conspirators in the act of touch.

In her new solo exhibition, Inured to Pain - Acostumbrada al dolor, Ana Armengod gives her unflinching attention to a phenomenon of quiet annihilation.

The exhibition at Persons Unknown features Se Prendió Candela, a super 8 mm film/installation shot in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba. The film delves into the untold stories of women who self immolate as a form of suicide, intertwined with the artist’s own embodied encounter, illuminating the silent act of self-immolation as both rupture and resistance.

The Museum of Human Touch is a speculative exhibition that imagines a future where our intimacy with screens has replaced physical experience, reshaping our bodies and identities. Featuring sculptures crafted from recycled digital waste such as obsolete gadgets, medical tubing, and packaging materials, the exhibition explores the seductive pleasure and hidden violence of our device-driven lives, challenging us to reconsider the fluidity, fragility, and possibility of the human body in a tech-saturated world.

Opening July 12th and running until August 3rd, Persons Unknown is thrilled to present a new body of work by photographer Dave Bush, entitled “NIGHT COLLECTING.”

TIME TRAFFICKING

Maddie Butler, Coralys Carter, Nykelle DeVivo, Moe Penders Ramos

Curated by Leandro Martínez Depietri

Collective imagination is constantly pulled to an immediate future by the media and mainstream

discourses with their emphasis on innovation and creativity, the promises and dangers of artificial intelligence and space travel, and the imminence of an ecological collapse that feels all too present. At the same time, the renewed force of fascism in the Global North with its imperial nostalgia has raised the stakes in the battle for a collective memory that has long been disputed.

Chimeras, monsters, a two headed troll doll carved in white Carrera marble, childhood artifact transformed into a church gargoyle. The stone sculptures of Joshua Pelletier straddle the fraught doorway between the grand beauty of antiquity and a mutated present.

On April 26th, Persons Unknown is delighted to present the wild and playful characters of Alfonse Aletto, in a survey show composed of paintings, drawings and small ceramic masks. 

An exhibition of works by Inga Hendrickson, Rachel Elizabeth Jones, Caitlin Servilio, and Corrine Yonce that coalesce around themes of tumultuous accumulation and porous processes of sense-making through material encounters.

Persons Unknown, in partnership with Deadly Prey Gallery of Chicago, will ring in the Holiday season with more than 50 hand-painted movie posters from Ghana! Exhibition to feature the work of great Ghanaian artists: Mr Brew, Heavy J, Death is Wonder, Wise Art, Farkira, Salvation, Stoger, Mr. Nana Agyq, C.A. Wisely, Magasco, Nii Bi Ashitey, Bright Obeng and H.K. Mathias.

The erotics of decay is both the anarchic polyphony of aliveness and fundamental to our experience of living exchange, and the connection we seek in order to become ourselves. The edge of desire is where we ripen, where we burst open to the air and waiting world. This spillage, this moment of life overflowing, is the tipping point into decay and the ecstatic dissolution of the self.

This exhibition seeks to engage with eros as a generative force, decay as an agent of aliveness, and art as the medium to explore the possibilities of both.

Featuring Ashton Phillips, Sadie Greyduck, Laura Steele, Dave Bush, Katie Murphy, and Dylan Ricards