Toxic "Vandall" Group Show (May 2023)

TOXIC “VANDAL” SHOW, FITZROVIA GALLERY — MAY 2023 SYSTEM LOG ENTRY
May 2023

Before the floppies, before the frame wars, there was a room. A real room. With walls, lighting, and humans not filtered through JPEG compression. That room was Fitzrovia Gallery, May 2023. The occasion? Toxic's "Vandal” — a beautifully dysfunctional group show featuring fellow creative saboteurs: Pang, Blok, Liam Fallon, Chris Cawkwell, and Peter Fried.

For my part, I wheeled in a set of 100×100cm oil paintings on canvas, each one a lovingly rendered dose of socio-cultural whiplash:
🟠 PornHub: Supporting the birthrate decline since 2007
🐽 Peta Pig: A carnivorous cartoon contradiction
🍄 Super Mario Bros Before Hoes: The LAN party loyalty crisis, 2003–2010

It was chaotic, cheeky, and a bit cathartic — the first time I got to show many of these pieces in person rather than ship them off into the void of postal code anonymity. Seeing collectors in real life? Surreal. Like meeting pen pals from the old BBS boards, only now we were swapping theories about hidden ASCII symbols and whether that scratch on the canvas was intentional. (Spoiler: it was.)

The show was a blast. Loud, irreverent, slightly sticky in atmosphere — in other words, perfect. And it marked a key checkpoint in my artistic journey: proof that even the weirdest ideas can thrive when shared, offline, among the analog faithful.

—Arlo
“Vandalism, but make it oil.”