Detail from The Portals by Joey Mars
by Steve Desroches
It was a night like any other that turned out to be an event that would garner international attention. In 1966, 19-year-old Airman First Class Robert Matthews was returning to the North Truro Air Force Station after a night out in Provincetown. It was common then for those that lived on the base (where Payomet Performing Arts Center is now) to take a bus from Provincetown, get off at the stop near Dutra’s Market (now Salty’s Market) and call from the phone booth nearby for someone to come pick them up. And that’s just what Matthews did. When 15 minutes or so passed, more than enough time for his ride to arrive, he called again. This time he was told they had come hours ago and he had been nowhere to be found. And so began the phenomenon of North Truro Village as an alien abduction hot spot and the concept of “missing time.”
If you are a believer, the Outer Cape has attracted the attention of an intelligent life form elsewhere in the universe. If you are a skeptic, all the accounts—and there are hundreds—are the result of some sort of social psychology mass contagion, with abductees repeating stories influenced by local and pop culture that could be explained otherwise or are just introduced false memories. Either way, the subject of aliens is as much a part of local culture as art, fishing, drag queens, and theater. That in large part is because of the work of artist Budd Hopkins. A painter whose work showed at Berta Walker Gallery for years, Hopkins claimed to have seen a UFO in 1964 as he was driving along Beach Point towards Provincetown. This experience along with the news of Matthews’ experience led him to become a UFO investigator, a life’s work that at the time eclipsed his art. He wrote several best-selling books on the subject, including Sight Unseen: Science, UFO Invisibility, and Transgenic Beings; Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods; and Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO Abductions. It’s the title of the latter that is the theme of this year’s Outsider Festival and the inspiration for an interactive installation by artist Joey Mars.
Produced by Camp Provincetown, an arts organization founded by artist and archivist Chuck White, the Outsider Festival invited Mars to create a work on the theme of Missing Time. The result is The Portals, two refashioned phone booths that incorporate a storytelling and archival aspect to them. One booth will be installed for two weeks on the front lawn at the Commons, 46 Bradford St., before moving to Coastline Tattoo, 290A Commercial St., at the end of the Bob Gasoi Memorial Art Alley, where it will be integrated into a multi-media installation by Kris Smith until September. The other booth will be installed next to Salty’s Market, where the phone booth at the center of the missing time phenomenon was, until Labor Day. The two booths, which were given to Mars by artist Billy Rene after he found them at an Outer Cape transfer station, were turned into a metaphor to explore time, lapses in memory, history, and the perceptions of the past, all themes very familiar to Mars and his work.
“Where does time go,” says Mars. “I’ve always been about exploring time. The bending of time. I’ve always been interested on that level. What is slipping away as they change. Losing people. Nostalgia. Memory. Ruptures in time.”
The only constant is change, and on the Outer Cape there is the odd mixture of old ways being passed on through generations and relics of the past that are still relevant alongside a constant flow of people, ideas, and losses. And also, Provincetown is the kind of locale where most everything is romanticized, and mythology can quickly replace truth as well as other aspects to life out here lost to history. With that in mind, each “portal” will have a QR code inside, allowing one to record their own thoughts on time, any experiences with missing time, or really any message they would like to leave for the future, as the recordings will be archived as part of a digital time capsule. There will also be motion-detection cameras to film whatever passes by at all hours of the day.
“It’s meant to capture nature that we might not otherwise see,” says Mars. “Rabbits, coyotes, foxes, a chupacabra, maybe a celebrity or two.”
The aesthetic used to decorate each phone booth is very much in the tradition of Mars, a well-known artist who works in a variety of mediums embracing the counter culture, rock and roll, and outsider art, best encapsulated locally by the façade of Shop Therapy that he painted. Often inspired by graffiti art, Mars says that while some may consider mailboxes, trash cans, and bus shelters covered by graffiti and stickers to be ugly, he sees it as representations of layers of time. Individuals left their mark to be seen and then covered over by another, an interactive work unto themselves. In a way, entering the booths is a way of doing the impossible, stopping time, by contemplating the non-linear fashion of the universe and humanity’s creation of time to give order to chaos.
“It’s time to chronicle this great time of change,” says Mars. “The old guard is passing away and a new day is upon us.”
The Second Annual Outsider Festival runs now through May 13. For more information visit campprovincetown.com.
