Brian Droitcour’s essay on New Bad Image sharply outlines the mechanics of the contemporary image system ... legibility, optimisation, deliberate reintroduction of friction through excess.
Sitting with the exhibition after reading his text, I found myself pulled in a slightly different direction.
Less toward how these images resist the system... and more toward what they become after prolonged exposure to it.
There was a time when a damaged image signalled failure. Compression artefacts, jpeg noise, deep frying, bad crops, overlaid text, meme debris... these were signs of corruption. Evidence that an image had drifted from some intact original.
That distinction feels difficult to sustain now. Images no longer degrade after circulation. Circulation is one of the conditions under which they are made. They emerge anticipating reposting, theft, remix, screenshots, compression, speculation, fandom, irony... They are born already touched.... by platforms, by markets, by strangers, by repetition.
Perhaps the “bad image” is not a failed image at all. Perhaps it is the image after too much contact.
Where one reading of the “bad image” frames it as resistance (a way of breaking legibility, frustrating the algorithm, adding friction back into optimised systems) the works in New Bad Image often feel less like acts of opposition and more like consequences.
These images are not trying to escape the system. They are what remains when the system has already run too long, too hard, and too often.
Not refusal... Aftermath.
The exhibition’s framing self-made mythmaking is the key.
Because myth here is not stable. It is argued into existence. Improvised from fragments. Partially remembered. Misremembered. Contested in public.
In one exchange, the very idea of “Avant Gay” as a coherent scene is dismissed outright... something that doesn’t meaningfully exist beyond a loose influx of artists, traders, and platforms.
What follows isn’t a rebuttal. It’s an accumulation. Fragments surface. Early experiments. Discord servers. Patronage structures. Arguments on the timeline. Collections born out of conflict. Scenes forming and dissolving around money, attention, shared references.
“Read this whole account as part of the art.”
The instruction is not metaphorical. The scene does not exist as a stable category. It exists as a network of references, gestures, relationships, recurring images... something you trace rather than define.
Elsewhere, the same voice pushes further:
And then:
But that feels incomplete.
The tension between the two is not incidental. It is the engine. Myth, here, is not a fixed narrative. It is a process of selective revelation... Breadcrumbs... Enough context for those willing to engage, but never enough to become fully legible.
Andreas Gysin’s announcement design quietly establishes this logic before the works even begin.
Typography disperses into particulate drift. Language fragments into signal and noise. Meaning dissolves, but pattern persists. It reads less like graphic design and more like a thesis image for the show: that coherence is no longer given ... it is something assembled through fragments.
Parker Ito’s Fashion Terrorist sits close to the centre of this field.
These works don’t simply reference contamination... they operate as contaminated surfaces. Floral romanticism, scanner textures, degraded luxury imagery, collectible ephemera and digital residue collapse into one another until painting itself begins to behave like circulation.
They feel less like images and more like objects that have been handled too many times. Damaged, but not diminished.
Petra Cortright sharpens this lineage.
Her presence matters because she established, early, that software native image making (default brushes, desktop aesthetics, digital layering) could carry the weight of painting. Here, her return to degraded webcam systems shifts the focus from interface to interference. Not the tool, but the breakdown of the tool.
The image clouded. Unreadable. Protected.
But the exhibition becomes more volatile when it moves into the Solana avant scene.
Because MiFella, Luhhfella, Evil Biscuit, Tojiba and Terrorism are not simply extending post internet strategies. They are mutating them into something closer to crypto folk cosmology. Here, derivative imagery becomes a generative engine rather than a limitation... Lore becomes medium. Collectibles become carriers of meaning. And perhaps most importantly... bad taste becomes a form of intelligence.
MiFella’s Deep Fried Milady is almost brutally simple.
An image compressed to the point of collapse. Hair, eyes, face reduced to saturated striations... a PFP pushed so far through circulation it begins to resemble a glyph.
Not decline. Pressure. An image cooked until it holds the memory of every transformation it has passed through.
Luhhfella’s stills move in the opposite direction.
Where the PFP smooths expression into legibility, these works reintroduce friction through gesture... scribbled, strained, excessive. The hand reappears, but not as mastery. As effort. As failure. As insistence. A refusal to resolve.
Evil Biscuit’s Blessings and Curse pushes toward full cosmology.
Layered animations unfold like a corrupted game system. Sprites, devotional imagery, and painterly backdrops collapsing into one another. It feels theatrical, occult, unstable. Less like a single image and more like a world trying to hold itself together. Not illustration... Environment.
Tojiba operates differently again.
Cooler. More detached. Corporate logic turned into aesthetic material. Branding as performance. Tool building as authorship. The “brand manager” persona functioning less as joke than as structure... exposing how image production, distribution, and identity collapse into one another.
Terrorism’s card works introduce something the show quietly depends on.
Tenderness.
Where much of the exhibition leans into overload, distortion and irony, these works retain a romantic register. Trading card structures suggest activation (power, effect, meaning) but the imagery feels drained, filtered, held at a distance. Potential without release... And yet, something persists. A sense that even within systems that flatten meaning, images can still carry feeling.
Ann Hirsch and Maya Man’s New Year, New Bitches sits in a similar tension.
Synthetic bodies. Generated faces. AI assisted undressing. The aesthetics are familiar (influencer, doll, calendar) but pushed beyond coherence. Femininity rendered as system, then broken through repetition and excess. Not critique from the outside. Collapse from within.
Across these works, a pattern emerges.
Not simply degradation.... Accumulation.
Each image feels like it carries the weight of its own circulation... the marks of being shared, compressed, reinterpreted, recontextualised.
Touched too many times.
There is, however, a risk embedded in this language.
Once degradation becomes recognisable as style... once the “bad image” itself becomes legible... it risks re entering the very systems it set out to disrupt. Ugliness circulates. Distortion stabilises. Even failure becomes aesthetic.
The question then becomes... can contamination remain insurgent once it is expected? The exhibition doesn’t resolve this... But it presses on it... And that pressure gives the work weight.
Because what New Bad Image ultimately reveals is not simply how images break... But how meaning survives after they do.
In an environment defined by infinite feeds, synthetic abundance, attention extracted at scale... authorship begins to look porous. Identity becomes assembled. And authenticity, if it survives at all, survives not as purity, but as residue.
As distortion. As scar tissue. As myth built from fragments.
The bad image, then, is not the failed image of our time.
It is the image after too much contact.
And it may be the only kind of image we have left.