“Avocado Toast (Side A)” by Ashley Taylor, 2023 Credit: Image courtesy Ashley Taylor

Picking one’s way through the jumble of anxiety-inducing slogans wiggling all over Ashley Taylor’s “Avocado Toast (Side A and Side B),” the message is clear: Our millennials are not OK.

YOLO, FOMO and “This is fine!” may register to their elders as just so many hashtags, but when translated with empathy, looking beyond the ironic exclamation points, they are cris de coeur that cannot be ignored.

“Avocado Toast (Side B)” by Ashley Taylor, 2023 Credit: Image courtesy Ashley Taylor

In Petty, Taylor’s candy-colored subjects twist about the paper like specimens pinned to a slide, grimacing and grinning in agony. But dismiss these neon-bright prints as mere comics at your own peril — the subject matter may be of the moment, but the tradition of grotesquerie they fall into is not. These contorted faces and bodies deliver a can’t-look-away message skewering America’s most cherished myths, taking their place in a line that extends from Hogarth to Nast to Oliphant to the Usual Gang of Idiots.

The opening of Petty is celebrated at Snap’s latest Le Salon party, along with a handful of new works by other artists.

7 p.m., Friday, May 26, Snap! Orlando, 420 E. Church St., snaporlando.com, free.

“Reaction Machine” by Ashley Taylor, 2023 Credit: Image courtesy the artist

Snap Downtown

420 E. Church St., Orlando, FL

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This article appears in May 24-30, 2023.

Jessica Bryce Young has been working with Orlando Weekly since 2003, serving as copy editor, dining editor and arts editor before becoming editor in chief in 2016.