Lord of the Butterflies
Vanessa Mayoraz and Ashton Phillips
June 6th — June 28th
Opening Reception: Saturday June 6th 7-10pm
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.
You and I are always going to fight
for love.
Andrea Gibson
Lord of the Butterflies
Ashton Phillips is a socially and ecologically-engaged artist and writer focused on the plasticity of bodies, the transness of matter, and the poetics of impurity, mutual contamination, and mass extinction/survival. His most recent work experiments with modes of collective listening and interspecies voice as methods for resisting erasure, intimidation, and isolation in neo-fascist times. Ashton’s multi-sensory installations and performances have been shown across the US and abroad, including recent exhibitions at MaryTwo Gallery, Switzerland; Human Resources, LA; the Audubon Center at Debs Park; 2220 Art + Archives, LA; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, LA; and the Ely Center for Contemporary Arts. He holds an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art; a JD from the George Washington University Law School; and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Maryland. His creative and critical writing have been published by Trans Studies Quarterly; Antennae - The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture; Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles; and Cambridge University Press.
Vanessa Mayoraz is a multi-disciplinary artist working between the United States and Geneva, Switzerland, whose work examines the paradoxical tensions between personal history, social landscape, and the natural world — tracing the growing artificiality of our relationship with nature. Mayoraz has exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and institutions including the Moscow Young Artist Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, ArtBo Bogotá, and Chashama Gallery New York. She is the recipient of a Current Art Fund Grant, Pro-Helvetia national Swiss grant, and a Swiss Cultural Program in the Western Balkans grant. She holds a BFA from the Haute École d'Art et de Design, Geneva, and an MFA from Bauhaus University Weimar, and currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Art at the University of South Florida.