"Upon entering Johnny McMahon's installation 'The Fog', you immediately have the sensation of being caught up in a semiotic minefield. This is an umcomfortable space to be in, where the ugliness of the virtual and material worlds butt up against each other. A painting daubed with thick paint spells out a crass internet meme, balancing on two-day-old cartons of milk. In one corner, a printed textile image of a Mark Zuckerberg avatar floats above a child's baseball bat.

McMahon's installation of work has a close affinity with what the art theorist David Joselit defined some time ago as 'transitive painting' - where paintings take part and move in a network of relationships, changing and adapting in a comparablemanner to the flow of digital information. While in lockdown, McMahon immersed himself in this digital space, observing the absurd humour he found in chatrooms and throwaway memes. This digital researchhas seeped into the materiality of his new work."