Art Review: CHOPPED SLOPPED SCREWED at Vox Populi in Philadelphia
A hypnotic digital triptych that slows the slop by chopping and screwing.
A quick Google Trends search of the word “slop” charts a rapid increase in usage from mid-2024, peaking in December 2025. Merriam-Webster named it the word of the year. First used in the 1700s to mean soft mud, the definition has since evolved to describe digital content of low quality, usually generated in quantity by means of artificial intelligence. But slop has an older, bodily meaning too: unappetizing, watery food. Something you’re forced to consume. Something that consumes you.
Before viewing the exhibition, I’d anticipated a more overstimulating experience given the title, but was surprised by the hypnotic, almost grounding quality of CHOPPED SLOPPED SCREWED at Vox Populi, currently on view through February 15, 2026. Artist collective BLACKnet comes together in a true collision of worlds—a three-channel video installation by Zante Moore, Shori “Halie” Sims, and Logan Crompton, curated by Ollie Goss.
Flashing light almost blinds you as you enter the dark room, where two benches sit parallel to the center projection. At first I stare straight ahead from the middle of the room. I rotate my head from side to side, trying to make sense of the triple-projection experience. I finally sit down and settle into letting the work wash over me. The piece runs nine minutes and twenty-four seconds. I was short on time—my parking meter would be up in fifteen minutes—but I sat for the piece one and a half times through.
For taking on the aesthetics of a video game, the graphics are more serene than expected, too. I see no violence. The word “chopped” is in the title, but I see no physical knives out. The word “screw” is used, but other than bodies thrusting into the void and low-pixel skins, it’s not explicit. The thrusting almost seems to pulse like a ticking metronome keeping time. The piece is guided by the audio.
After some research, I realize the title itself is an homage and a mutation. “Chopped and screwed” is the hip-hop remixing technique pioneered by the late Houston DJ Screw in the early 1990s, slowing the tempo of a track to a syrupy crawl, then cutting and skipping beats to produce something heavy, hypnotic, and irreversibly altered. BLACKnet applies that logic to the work’s audio and video. Where DJ Screw screwed the beat, BLACKnet screws the pixel, the avatar, the chatroom, the background music. And the addition of “slopped” wedged between the chop and the screw signals something messier, more deliberate.
As someone who doesn’t play video games or know much about Lil’ Kim other than her iconic Lady Marmalade, here’s what I saw and heard. The installation cycles through registers with disorienting ease. One moment, a room-browser interface fills the projection wall: “Featured Rooms,” “Recents,” the lobby architecture of IMVU rendered monumental by scale. Avatars drift through saturated landscapes where texture refuses realism: oversized sunflowers planted in grassy patches, a purple knitted tower rises against a foreboding red sky, and a winged figure blooms into a blown-out halo of white light, simultaneously angelic and overexposed. Old internet aesthetics are strong. Suddenly, the image snaps into low-resolution club theatrics: bodies jitter, clip, and collide in hot magenta light. Shori “Halie” Sims serves up what the press release aptly calls “PS2 Lil’ Kim realness,” avatars that channel the rapper’s unapologetic, hypersexualized visual language through the chunky polygons and limited texture maps of early-2000s gaming hardware. Audio harvested from late-night IMVU chatrooms, courtesy of Logan Crompton, bleeds through at the end of the video: “I’ve been listening the whole time,” a speaker declares, again and again. “Stop fucking playing me, bitch.” It’s a private argument broadcast at gallery scale. It’s also an unknowable dialogue, opaque to an outsider.
BLACKnet describes itself as “post internet and meme concerned,” meaning the internet isn't a place you visit but a condition you live inside, one that shapes us. Legacy Russell's Glitch Feminism and The Black Meme push this idea further, articulating how that condition is racialized, how Black images in particular get copied, compressed, and commodified through circulation. BLACKnet doesn't stage virtual worlds as escapism. It stages the conditions under which identity gets built, performed, and valued. The seams stay visible throughout—blur, blown highlights, jagged edges, mismatched textures—and rather than clean up the roughness, the work lets it stand. Hito Steyerl called this kind of degraded, well-traveled image a “poor image.” The avatars in CHOPPED SLOPPED SCREWED are worn on purpose, made to look like they’ve already traveled through a hundred platforms before arriving on this wall.
Zante’s work has been described as a “digital triptych,” a frame that fits here too. What happens if slop is slowed down and split into three panels? It feels precious despite the low-quality graphics. Triptychs historically were a devotional format: hinged altarpieces where the central image held the sacred subject and the side panels provided context. The viewer’s eye moved laterally while understanding that meaning emerged from the relationship between the three. That logic maps directly onto a three-channel video installation: you can’t absorb all three projections at once, so you choose where to look, catch something in peripheral vision, and accept that you’re always missing part of the piece. Yet unlike a medieval altarpiece, you’re watching an avatar thrust into a void. The format also resists the single-screen logic of scrolling. A TikTok or Instagram feed gives you one image at a time, sequentially, infinitely. A triptych gives you three images at once, finitely. It demands presence rather than consumption. That feels deliberate; the form itself slows you down.
In a recent interview with Sixty Inches From Center about their show IJBOL Fields, Zante describes their work as a meme as mourning, a meme heaven, or meme graveyard. BLACKnet’s installation feels, to me, like a funeral for the graphics of an early internet era. The press release poses the question plainly: in an “attention driven economy” where Black images are commodified, what does it mean for artists to reclaim and superimpose themselves in both digital and IRL space? I won’t pretend to answer that question from my vantage point, but the work makes it feel urgent.
My brain tries to make sense of slop—the overconsumption of information, the endless scroll—but the slop declares itself unknowable. The video slowly fades, and the glowing avatar recedes into the landscape like a comet dissolving into deeper space. And then it loops. What makes CHOPPED SLOPPED SCREWED land is its embrace of what BLACKnet calls “everythingism,” a willingness to let contradiction ooze: cute and abject, sacred and trash, intimate and public. In a moment when slop floods our timelines, BLACKnet generates its own slop: slowed down, mournful, haunting, and resonant. I leave the exhibition feeling humbled at what I don’t know about the work, a quality I love in any memorable piece.