Philadelphia’s underground artist Justin Duerr is showing his latest graffiti-esque Sharpie drawings at 309 Gallery. But Duerr is even more charming on film than in print. He stars in the documentary “Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles” where he tries to track down who’s been embedding linoleum tiles (the size of license plates) into the streets of Philly (since the 1980s!). They’re wrapped in tar paper and coated in glue then placed in the middle of busy intersections. As cars drive over the tiles, pressing them into the asphalt, they slowly degrade the tar paper, until it has completely peeled away, revealing this bizarre-o message: “Toynbee Idea in Kubrick’s 2001 Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter.”
Spoiler alert: many believe it was a fellow Philadelphian, a carpenter named James Morasco who dropped them through a hole in the floor of his car while broadcasting a message via short wave radio about his mass conspiracy theories.
