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