TIME TRAFFICKING

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

Curated by Leandro Martínez Depietri

May 31 – June 22 2025

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.

Art’s ability for trafficking other temporalities takes centerstage in what we call the present. The haunting of past traumas brings about infinite returns of what was left unresolved and artists, as divers of the collective unconscious, materialize the ghosts in myriad ways. Other artists have kept in touch with atavic lines of flight and call upon the ancestors to join them in the everyday fight for survival and emancipation; art serves them as a site for quiet conjuring. In either case, these specters illuminate how things have been made what they are today but also how they could have been different and might yet, and always, be different again. I see these artists, brought together by the MFA program at the University of California San Diego, as sharing these concerns, albeit with great differences between them. Bless their singularities for they give us a strange but alluring show! We may start off with Maddie Butler who goes beyond the reminder that the cloud is anything but intangible and brings back the material debris of digital technologies to search for the light of fleeting yet cherished memories. What can be retrieved from the immediacy of programmed oblivion? Moreover, Maddie weaves the grid that was made synonym of community during the inexhaustible Zoom meetings of the pandemic and lets us see it as a void frame that fragments reality. With Moe Penders Ramos it is the journey that surfaces with the difficulty of tracing what is left behind and what is created in each step. Moe faces the aporia of displacement and disidentification, how migrating troubles identity by both de-anchoring the body from its soil but also affirming a nomadic sense of self. May the silent memory of a tree guide us? May the depleted body find rest in the swinging movements of an in-between territory? Coralys Carter goes to where it hurts but also shows us what can be built from pain, from the acute awareness of the body as a site of memory and endless reinvention. She asks us: What does it feel? And then pulls from the threads of personal history and leaves them hanging, awaiting their weaving into a new fabric. In here, her works face the striking Californian sunlight and the anonymity of LA’s cityscape, like secret relics offered to the wandering transits of unknown lives. Finally, Nykelle DeVivo brings forth the true powers of Masquerade, not as a celebration of secrecy or a spectacle for alienated tourists, but as a collective force conjured to disrupt power dynamics. Channeling ancestral black rage, the conqueror is inverted and transformed into a duppy conqueror able to reflect and expand the light, shining from what has been historically obscured and misrepresented. Sacred violence manifests in a redemptive character, a demiurge bringing about a new Bing Bang.

- Leandro Martínez Depietri

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.  A self-taught artist born in Brooklyn, NY, Al now lives in the canyons of Santa Clarita where he relentlessly pursues painting and drawing in the small windows of time between full-time work, family dinner, drum practice and bed.  Considering how little time is available, Al is a confoundingly prolific artist.  He makes at least one painting per day!  And with that kind of output, that kind of scattershot image-making, come works of inventiveness, unrestrained imagination and high energy.  You can see his energy in the restless way he makes his marks, applies his paints, captures things out of thin air.  He dances with materials. This show, portraits of the bungled and the botched, are only a fractional cross-section in Al’s restless creative output. Without guile or pretense, Al uses his painting time to play games with form, explore novel textures, get weird.  We reap the benefits of his internal mining in images that are often surprising, off-beat, and full of charm.  A giant blue house smoking a cigarette, a pair of puppet-like kids boxing. Unvarnished, unguarded, and full of mischief, these portraits are funhouse versions of the faceless crowds and anonymous yahoos who people our world. 

Opening Reception on April 26th, from 7-10PM: snacks and refreshments for the bungled and botched. Show runs until May 20th.

Extended through January 18th! Closing reception Saturday 1/18/25 from 7-10pm.

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!

In the 90’s, there was a dearth of movie houses in Ghana, particularly in the more rural areas of the country. In response to a growing demand for movies, American movies in particular, many clever entrepreneurs would pack up a station wagon with a TV set, VCR, and portable generator in order to travel from town to town showing the latest blockbuster films available on video tape, everything from “Purple Rain” to “The Terminator”. The town would assemble in a public squares to watch these movies from folding chairs. In order to advertise coming attractions, local artists were hired to paint full color posters for each movie, usually using house paint for the color and old grain sacks as their canvas. Having little to no information to go on, save perhaps for a glimpse of the video box or a description of the action, these artists filled any gaps in their canvases with what they imagined would draw a crowd- usually the lurid and the grotesque. The crowds had a real taste for horror movies, and so these artists would embellish their works as necessary with blood, mayhem, and magic to ensure interest. Witches, dismemberments and terrifying creatures would find their way into even the most benign movies- “Tootsie”, “ET”, or “The Matrix”, creating unhinged, alternate fever-dream versions of the original films. The result are posters which take our familiar pop-cultural touchstones-stories familiar to us and seemingly set in stone- and infuse them with playful, anarchic imagination.

The energy behind these images is infectious. Kicking down the fence between author and audience, they remind us that all these movies, all these stories, are really collaborative propositions. Movies are dreams which enter our heads and now belong to us, raw material for our collective imagination. We have all the freedom in the world to continue them, refashion them, even change them completely. So why don’t we?

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.

Katie Murphy holds a BFA in Studio Art from East Tennessee State University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Studio Art from Maryland Institute College of Art. Murphy is a painter working with ideas of personal feminism. She grew up in Mississippi where cultural norms and expectations had a profound impact on her and continue to provide avenues to questioning and rethinking contemporary womanhood. Questions of propriety and inhabited space inform her expressive figurative paintings. Murphy currently lives and works in Johnson City, TN.

Ripe and Bursting (towards an erotics of decay)

August 24th-September 15th

“What then is decay? Watching a compost heap transform into fertile soil it can seem like decay is genesis. Decay is the first scene in a comedy of mycelial threads and millipedes and sprouting wildflowers, seeds invisibly deposited by a bird flying overhead. Sometimes I think about death as being the transition from a solitary aliveness to an anarchic polyphony of aliveness.”

–Sophie Strand, Confessions of a Compost Heap

“Being in the world is primarily an erotic encounter, an encounter of meaning through contact, an encounter of being oneself through the significance of others—humans, lovers, children, but also other beings, companions and competitors. From birth, and probably even before it, we experience the fundamental erotics of being touched by the world, and of touching it in return, as a life-bestowing power. We experience living exchange as fundamental reality. We long to connect with an other—be it word, skin, food, or air—in order to become ourselves. In this experience, we are not separated from the world, but deeply incorporated into it: feeling parts of the whole, which can thus become transparent to itself in a meaningful way. It is precisely this reality, in all of its creative growth, that we wish to preserve—an expressive, meaningful reality of which we are a part.” 

–Andreas Weber, Why Erotic Ecology?

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.

Featured Artists:

Ashton Phillips, Sadie Greyduck, Laura Steele, Dave Bush, Katie Murphy, Dylan Mack