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Vile chicken or Evil Mushroom :
The Great American Circus and The Illusion of choice
2026



On the occasion of

Vile Chicken or Evil Mushroom
Joe Gardner
10th - 12 April 2026
162 Holloway Road

“Before I flew back out to LA in October I got offered two choices of food for the flight . ‘Vile chicken’ or ‘evil mushroom’. Despite the illusion of choice, anything I ate would leave me feeling disappointed unsettled and probably sick”

An accumulation of pictures taken during the home stretch of the US Electoral Race, Vile chicken or Evil Mushroom foremost reads as a practice of mass production and discernment. Shoot first, think later. At first glance, the images look like chance encounters - the sort of scenes you wouldn’t glance twice at in person, let alone have time to capture on camera - and yet, like a really good joke, all the pieces fall into place almost instantly. A cop rests idly on his phone against the backdrop (literally) of a Turning Point USA rally, where arms outstretched to the sky in praise effortlessly warp into scenes straight out of a Reich march. Across the room, a prophetic portrait of Charlie Kirk, overexposed jugular to the camera, sits behind a screen resembling bulletproof glass. Though rendered blurry, Kirk is immediately recognisable,  highlighting the audience’s (perhaps unwilling) involvement - even from across the pond - in the making of an icon. A symbol of the conflation or literal blurring of political and anarchical, popular and political culture, in Trump’s America.  

There is no predictable order to the images in Vile Chicken ; Democratic hope and eventual disquiet is interspersed with Republican certainty, pomposity and vice versa. For something as sequential as a race, Gardner is careful not to mark a start or a finish, nor does he assign victor and loser to either party, but instead documents “the illusion of choice” preceding inevitable "disappointment".

A Democratic volunteer types away - presumably late at night - on the floor, next to a neatly organized pile of campaign posters in some sort of backroom. Turn your head, and a display of kitschy, blinged-out “Trump” and “45/47” memorabilia sprawled across a floor, echoes an equal level of desperation. 


In a time when the American news stream feels so far removed from sense or reality, especially when experienced through a screen far away, it’s easy to relegate it all to fiction. The images in Vile Chicken echo the traits of war photography - intrusiveness, immediate action and fact - and yet, in the previous sense, they’re a show of surrender to the absurdity; eschewing ‘as-it-happened’ reportage to document the demise of a fairytale.


I recently had a discussion with a mother about how , with the release of the Epstein files, I couldn’t imagine upholding the guise of right and wrong in the face of a child today. The myth that ‘good’ always triumphs over evil and the latter is always punished. The images collectively paint a portrait of this fairytale’s decay through the microcosm of the electoral race. Within a two - party system, the story writes itself, you have a hero and a villain. But as Gardner sobers us up to remember,  these notions are arbitrary, at least for now. Neither side is righteous, both are corrupt and the great American circus continues.