dayana matasheva & edson niebla, deanna havas, john desousa and tasneem sarkez

curated by ruba al-sweel

poor images

april 11 - may 24, 2025

POOR IMAGES presents works on canvas and moving image to question ideas around the evolution of painting as a medium historically tasked with recording reality--from painting to photography to cinema and now AI, the way this art form has evolved to free the image from the onus of reality has opened it up to icondules and iconoclasts alike, the exiled poets and peddlers, the witches, the diabolical, and the anathemic at the edge of the settlement, all in defence of the poor image.

Today this question of the ontological identity of model and image hardly subsided–ever advanced imaging technologies are met with increased deviation from the picture perfect. Text-to-image generative AI is undergoing “model collapse” due to a recursive process in which models are training on content generated by earlier versions of themselves, losing the ability to accurately represent the world, and giving rise to an inbred mutant with exaggerated, grotesque features.

Before the AI Slop of melting faces and extra fingers, this primordial hallucinatory chaos was found in the works of painters like Hieronymus Bosch of the Early Netherlandish School. A phantasmagoria beyond meaning which places art in the realm of the nonhuman, it employs a type of communication closer to quantum phenomena, or dreams or the unintelligible speech of angels, even.

Paintings are a slice of life, emphasized. A moment and a mood isolated, slowed and reverbed. The canvas floats like clouds in a hypnagogic state. The hand moves through time and space, analog imprints of the heart’s activity. From one swath to the other, a fleeting synthesis. In this instant, the painter - an artisan in trance - applies a pan and scan film editing technique, cropping parts of the original scene to heighten the composition's most potent aspects. A feeling, reified. A sound, evoked. An image, in movement. A new mix of temporalities frozen.

ruba al-sweel

dayana matasheva & edson niebla

The Numinous (2024)

Video, 5 min loop

La Mère et La Fille (2024)

30 x 30 cm

Diptych, oil on canvas

"La Mère et La Fille" is Madonna, is Whore, a proto-milf, a thot-daughter fed on scraps of Renaissance, stock photos, and unsent nudes clogging your iPhones. She stands there, someone's baby mama and someone's sex slave, in a room where the world just ended, and she knows she'll be here through it, again and again, like she always has been. She holds an heir to the burning and bleeding earth, the mother to the new Jesus who will resurrect as a JPEG. The baby Jesus we deserve. She births, and she mourns, over and over, a body made of flesh and machine, trapped within an ancient bad trip she can't escape.

We sent her off across the ocean, through files and servers, to a factory in China, where anonymous human hands manifested what AI imagined, collapsing sense and birthing a new kinda beauty. This isn't about who made her or who thought of her first. The hands fade into the code; the code fades into the oil canvas. AI's desire is now yours; soak it up, absorb, and dispose of it, like you always do.

"La Mère et La Fille" doesn't mourn or resist. It just hangs here, bound by the ancient sisterhood, alive in what's left. We're letting it settle, allowing the strangeness of this age to be something to hold onto, even if it's for the duration of your 8-second attention span. This isn't the end. It's just another beginning that feels like the end in a world that keeps trying to reinvent itself and calls it progress. Maybe that's all there is—this endless cycle that somehow, still, feels like home.

We have spent years archiving "cursed" images from social media and search engines, fearing their eventual disappearance from the internet. We fed this archive to MidJourney and used prompts to create aesthetic and thematic links between the images. While warped by AI, the archive traces remain recognizable throughout the video.

For narration, we cloned the hypnotic voice of YouTuber ASMR Darling (or some other really famous ASMR artist) using voice cloning software, as we felt an ASMR creator's voice best expressed our central theme—lucid dreaming. Music and animations were also created in AI, as we limited ourselves to using AI software exclusively.

The Numinous explores Das Unheimliche, AI's uncanny quality in its early development stage. It adapts surrealist defamiliarization techniques for the internet age, using globally known imagery and the voice that lulls millions into sleep every night.

The Numinous features an animated version of these images.

To create the diptych, we used photos found online with classical depictions of women. We then sent these AI-generated images to Dafen Village, China, where local painters reproduced them in oil on canvas. Over a month-long email exchange with the painting factory, we instructed them to focus on preserving AI artifacts, errors, and pixelation in the final works.

By outsourcing the painting labor, we wanted to highlight parallels between corporate methods of mass-producing wall art and the practices of the Old Masters, surfacing the labor behind branding and authorship. We were inspired by Kostabi World, Bernadette Corporation, and Warhol's Factory, updating their methods for the internet age.

This was created with Edson Niebla under our incorporated artist duo, DemonLovers Inc., which takes its name from Oliver Assaya's Demonlover (2001).

The left panel of “La Mère et La Fille” explicitly references Botticelli's The Birth of Venus through the woman's pose and the oceanic backdrop. However, this painting intentionally descends from a celestial to a terrestrial plane. Our Venus rejects the original's celebration of freedom and divine femininity. The symbol of sublime nature, the sea, is painted on an industrial wall, referring to artifice and loss of meaning. The woman, clad in white Shein lingerie, is captive. Beside her crouches a brooding male figure exerting control. We tried to highlight the paradox of female representation in art, where a symbol of emancipation is, in reality, a prisoner of male fantasies.

The right panel of “La Mère et La Fille”, too, descends from celestial to terrestrial, explicitly referencing an archetype from Western art historical canon: the Madonna and Child. Traditionally, the Madonna has been portrayed as an idealized white maternal figure, virtuous, "pure," and divine, usually—against the perfect pastoral landscape. “La Mère et La Fille” willfully presents the Madonna as a woman of color in a contemporary, cluttered apartment. Pets, blankets, scattered clothes, and the lived-in quality of the space directly propose the sanitized idealism of classical religious imagery. Behind our Madonna is the ecological collapse that the newborn Jesus will inherit. We rejected the traditional Madonna's role as a divine savior and painted her instead as a single mom in the face of absolute ecological devastation.

deanna havas

Untitled (2025)

150 x 150 x 2.5 cm

UV inkjet prints on polyester canvas

Three “Untitled” works on canvas are presented as “text paintings” featuring found text. The content for this series boasts ever-degenerating "copy-pastas", sourced from various places ranging from obscure internet forums, Youtube comments and advertising copy, collected over the span of several years. The works were then realized as UV inkjet prints on polyester canvas. Inspired by the cacophony of communications that permeates contemporary life, to me these utterances represent our collective truths, hopes and dreams.

john desousa

Porkchop (2024)

165 x 165 cm

Natural wool, printed cotton, cotton, dye, polyester thread, oil pastel, WonderWeb, and batting

“Porkchop” transforms Eduoard Manet’s painting Luncheon on the Grass into a tactile quilt. I found the painting’s historical significance, spatial flatness, and its figures' lack of social interaction compelling, as it reflects aspects of social media and the advent of a new aesthetic era. By turning it into a quilt—a communal object associated with outdoor gatherings—I wanted to mirror social media’s contradictory promise of connection. Chaotically compiled of visually similar images that I have photographed, screenshot, and generated—appearing as cracked phone screens, black censors, and takeout containers—”Porkchop” imitates AI pattern recognition, QR codes, and the ephemerality of digital consumption. The manipulated wool, romanticized nature of images, and aggressive mark-making weave through the composition, creating a corrupted pastoral fantasy.

tasneem sarkez

get you a girl that can do both (2025)

55 x 101 cm (each)

Diptych, oil on canvas

The piece combines two images. The image on the left is a film still taken from the documentary Gaddafi’s Elite Female Bodyguards. I was interested in this particular film still of one of the guards being interviewed in her uniform because the camera had made a deliberate choice to focus on a shot of her hands as she spoke. Her hands decorated with a henna design peeking out from the uniform. I was interested in that contrast of decorativeness of the buttons/uniform and the henna and how the femininity of the woman almost prevails through her henna, as these women were often in positions of gendered tension. The image on the right is taken from vintage packing of virginity soap. A blonde white woman lays on a bed of rose petals in a white dress. Almost another version of American Beauty’s (1999) iconic rose petal scene. There is a dream-like scenario to a naked woman in a bed of roses, and falling petals denote a romanticism and signify a sense of growth that most cultures deem as “transient”. That idyllic myth of a virgin, and the beauty that the packaging sells is a mirror of the image on the left. A similar kind of packing and branding that the guards underwent, and also themselves having to be a virgin. They become mirrors of each other. Tensions of gender and the symbols of how we come to dream of presenting womanhood - either through moments that feel like a victory of wearing henna while shooting a gun, or to lay on a bed of rose petals in a white dress “untouched”.