Of This Marvellous Void — a Culture Slop exhibition at Fluffy McCloud's, Los Angeles
Opening reception Sunday October 18th, 2026, 4–7PM at Fluffy McCloud's, 1814 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90026. Free and open to the public. Afterparty at El Prado. Curated by Andrew McClintock. Six artists from Culture Slop Season One — Mario Ayala, Amelia Lockwood, Matt McCormick, Mia Scarpa, Carley Gmitro, ProblemChild Advisory, and Mieke Marple — each make an artwork in the medium of an ice cream flavor, after Yves Klein's 1958 exhibition Le Vide at Galerie Iris Clert, Paris.
Of this marvellous void
Of this absolute love
I know that together
Without a word to one another
We will hurl ourselves
Into the reality of this void
Which awaits our love
As I wait for you each day . . .
Come with me into the void!
Yves KleinDimanche: The Newspaper of a Single Day, 1960
In 1958 Yves Klein's exhibition La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état de matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, generally known as Le Vide (The Void), opened on April 28, 1958 at Galerie Iris Clert, 3 rue des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
Le Vide is often situated within a longer history of artistic challenges to the autonomous art object: from Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain of 1917, through the conceptual practices of the late 1960s and 1970s, to later projects that understood art as a social encounter, including the discourse around Relational Aesthetics in the 1990s.
There is a commonly repeated story that the only artwork on view at the exhibition was blue cocktails made of gin, Cointreau, and methylene blue served at the opening reception which would make visitors urinate blue for up to a week. The artwork was completed by the audience, and carried away in their bodies.
Drawing on Le Vide, Andrew McClintock, Founder and Chief Taste Officer of Culture Slop has asked six contemporary artists, connected to the magazine’s inaugural issue to each create an artwork, in the medium of an ice cream flavor.
Each flavor will be made as a small batch, with fully organic ingredients, under the guidance of Nick Fisher, proprietor and le glacier of Fluffy McClouds. Artworks begin with each serving and end with each empty container.
For Le Vide, Klein had the gallery’s walls painted white over forty-eight hours, a preparation intended to clear the site’s prior history and create what he later described as “an atmosphere, a pictorial climate that is invisible but present.” An empty vitrine was also left on display. At Fluffy’s, these gestures are reversed. Each ice-cream container functions as the exhibition space for an individual artwork: a finite, material field that visitors gradually clear through tasting and consumption. As the flavors are depleted, the twelve-flavor ice-cream case becomes the exhibition’s vitrine—an accumulating display of absences. Each empty container records the audience’s participation in reducing a work to its remainder.
In 1957 Marcel Duchamp said during a lecture at Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957 “ All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. "
All of this may sound very serious. It is also, simply, an invitation to eat artisan ice cream dreamed up by six different artists. Please come with your curiosity, appetite, and whomever you want to share a cone with, including your children.
Mario Ayala is a painter based in Los Angeles whose influences include the Cool School of Los Angeles, Bay Area Funk Art, and Surrealism. His work is in the permanent collections of Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; The Broad, Los Angeles, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; and SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA. He has a forthcoming two person exhibition opening October 2026 at the Long Beach Museum.
In Culture Slop: Picture Consequences →Amelia Lockwood is an artist who primarily works with ceramic to produce sculptures that reference sites of collective exchange: celestial, geological, psychic, and architectural. She has had solo exhibitions at Morán Morán, Los Angeles, and the Catalina Museum. She received her MFA in Ceramics from The University of California, Los Angeles (2020). She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Matt McCormick operates at the intersection of cultural memory and material presence, distilling the residue of the American West into a highly personal yet broadly resonant visual language. Engaging with painting, drawing, and mixed media, McCormick's practice navigates the tension between historic mythologies and contemporary detritus, where cowboys, highways, and Hollywood dreams dissolve into the textures of lived experience. McCormick lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Miami, London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Aspen, and San Francisco.
In Culture Slop: Keeping the Conversation Going →Mia ScarpaMia Scarpa is a Los Angeles–based painter whose mark-making draws from memories of New England, vernacular Americana, and the visual language of subcultures; a 2020 BFA graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, she has exhibited at Anthony Gallery, Guerrero Gallery, VETA Galeria, 56 Henry, Loyal, The Mass Tokyo, Martha's ATX, and Spy Projects.
Carley GmitroCarley Gmitro is an artist and poet living and working in Los Angeles, CA. She received a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2020. Gmitro treats her work like an encoded diary with a broken key, employing the visual languages of diagrams, collage, and print making.
In Culture Slop: Tag Ur Friends <3 →ProblemChild Advisory serves as David Welch's conceptual curatorial practice, opening a window to art viewership in the digital age. ProblemChild Advisory has curated exhibitions in Los Angeles at Guerrero Gallery and in New York at Alyssa Davis Gallery.
In Culture Slop: A Conceptual Curatorial Practice for the Speed of the Feed →Mieke Marple is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. Marple has exhibited internationally, including in Techno-Healing at the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb and Elan Vital at MOCA Westport. She has been written about by the New York Times, W Magazine, the Guardian, Fortune, and Autre, among other publications. She has written for the Huffington Post, LA Review of Books, and McSweeney's, among others. She received a B.A. in Fine Art from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2008 and was co-owner of Night Gallery, 2011–2016.
In Culture Slop: Clowning, the Gift Economy, and What Comes After Social Media →