The void will consume us and it'll be dank - Minionotics at Weatherproof
For anyone who's been chronically online in the past couple of months, the terms “Vance head” and “Ghibli slop” have an eye-rolling, almost revolting quality. Both are memes that recently sprung out of nowhere and for a few days each it was nearly impossible to avoid their various permutations. They even made the rare jump offline onto major news channels, with Fox News covering JD Vance’s face, and The Verge covering OpenAI’s propensity for making images in the style of Studio Ghibli. Sometimes they even overlap…
john 11:35
What made these memes so effective is that they took an essentially empty vessel—the forgettable face of a politician that stands for nothing / a theft machine so vapid that everything that it produces is accurately termed slop—and juxtaposed each with some of the most extreme content on the web. The result was a profusion of monstrous amalgams, JD Vance’s dead eyes transposed on Judge Holden from Blood Meridian or the final moments of Trotsky rendered with flat shading, each image still retained just enough signifiers of the original reference to still point back to the origin of the meme. This ability to be stretched to the edge of legibility is a common theme of the truly viral meme—an aspect I kept returning to upon my visit to Chicago’s Weatherproof gallery for the closing of the group show Minionotics.
Organized by NYC-based entity Pop Gun and curated by Gunner Dongieux and Trinity Bavaria, this wall-to-wall exhibition features work by 135 artists from around the world (but mostly from New York). A portmanteau of semiotics and Minion (creature), Minionotics draws upon both aspects of its namesake to cover every available surface of the gallery in artworks—converting the gray and white of Weatherproof into a circus of blue-and-yellow. Ostensibly a “synaptic mapping of Pop Gun’s art-world,” the only readily evident organizational logic seems to be one theme—all the artworks in the show have to draw from the concept of Minions.
Installation view of Minionotics¹ - photo by the author
The Minion is a species of supporting character, known for wackadoo antics, that debuted in the 2010 film Despicable Me. As of this writing there are 6 feature length movies in the Despicable Me series. In order of release date, they are: Despicable Me (2010), Despicable Me 2 (2013), Minions (2015), Despicable Me 3 (2017), Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022), and Despicable Me 4 (2024). A 7th feature film - Minions 3 - is due in 2026. It’s a wildly popular franchise and has become a major hit for Universal Pictures, its distributor. Yet despite their 15‑year run, I still haven’t seen any of the movies. That hasn’t spared me from Minion‑laden media.
Much like JD Vance’s mug and Ghibli slop, Minions as a subject are a viral meme—instantly recognizable to anyone who spends much time online. Their underlying emptiness makes them the perfect vessel. They’re harmless, focus‑group‑engineered plushie bait, and Universal has adopted them as corporate mascots, joining Mickey Mouse and Spider‑Man in the pantheon of IP turned icon. Simply put, in becoming a symbol that ceases to stand for any one thing, it can become anything. In Minionotics, they do.
For this show, Weatherproof became a de-virtualized Know Your Meme page. Every surface—including the ceiling, occupied by Bavaria’s American Minion—holds Minion‑themed artwork.With 135 artists², the exhibition overwhelms your ability to distinguish one object from another; themes, content, and mediums bleed together, mimicking the experience of scrolling through every #minion post on TikTok. Two looping video works—Minion DVD by Parker Davis and Minion Video by Jacob Ciocci—pump out clashing audio, producing a babble worthy of their animated muses. In retrospect, the only pieces I can recall without photographic help are the most jarring: physical edgelord memes rendered IRL. By my count, at least 15 works show a Minion in a sexual encounter, proving once again the foundational rules of the internet.
Installation view of Minionotics - photo by the author
Sexual content in art is nothing new, but the overall vibe here feels different. Even the non‑sexual images seem cursed, often presenting outright unsettling content. As Ben Davis argues in “Culture Has No Name for This Cursed Vibe. It’s Everywhere” (Artnet, February 2025), the spread of internet aesthetics into cultural spaces that once rejected them has normalized shock. It’s the White House’s X account posting “ASMR” footage of shackled immigrants. It’s the world’s richest man brandishing a chainsaw onstage at the RNC. It’s what happens when the trolls take power—and in Minionotics, that’s exactly what has happened.
Written didactics are sparse: just two sentences in the press release. In contrast, the clearest curatorial statement may be the curators’ own contribution—two Dasani bottles filled with urine.³
Cole Denyer - Gunner (Curators Urine) & Trinity (Curators Urine) - photo by the author
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That isn’t to say the show wasn’t worth seeing. I’m inclined to agree with Arthur Danto’s notion that art “died” in the 1960s, freeing it from a linear historical framework. Minionotics exemplified this: Minions are art, draft stoppers are art, cursed paintings are art, bottles of piss are art— even bananas taped to walls are art.
As installed at Weatherproof for Minionotics - photo by the author
And when memes are the currency of today’s attention economy, an exhibition that treats them—and their embodied affect—as material is undeniably relevant.
Because, hell, if everything is awful, at least the memes will be dank.
Notes:
You might notice a large rectangular free space on the wall - When I attended on the day of its closing, the work that had been hung there had been sold and taken from the gallery - a Ben Foch painting.
While a ridiculous number, 135 artists does pale in comparison the largest group show (That I could find through a cursory googling) to happen in Chicago, a distinction held by Jackson Junge Gallery in Wicker Park as part of their TEN by TEN show that opened in late 2023, which hosted 300 artists showing 400 artworks.
There was a statement about this piece from Cole that Milo explained to me. Frankly I don’t think it bears repeating as it seemed like a disingenuous way for the artists to justify these works more than anything else.