Josh Short and Dylan Ricards
Hell or High Water

July 18th - August 9th, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 18th, 7-10 pm

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. 

Dylan’s work proposes relationships between materials, pairing tape loops of field recordings with found objects creating a poetic archive from what is found, broken, or overlooked, imagining non-linear futures assembled from the ruins of the present that organize into evolving indexes of culture, ecology, and time. Josh's work is an exercise in intentional world-building from the cast off pieces of the real world. His Art is built from found objects, gathered from the physical and digital waste stream creating interactive dioramas that tell a story from a parallel dimension known as the Gatorverse.
Together, Short and Ricards present two distinct yet complementary approaches to speculative world-building. Through the interplay of sound and sculpture, Hell or High Water invites viewers to consider how meaning is produced amid the continual churn of materials, stories, and histories. The exhibition asks us to take stock of the systems that shape our reality and to reflect on the narratives we construct in order to navigate an increasingly unstable world. In the aftermath of accumulation and excess, both artists locate spaces for imagination, transformation, and creative persistence.