SMAC Gallery is proud to present v5cml / reply, a solo project of new work by Asha Zero.

“Using paint and not collage is Asha Zero’s way of forcing the issue of ‘reality loss’. Today’s capitalist environments are mediated by our user identity, by the conversion of human movement, emotional responses, and preferences into data to further technological advancement and to make interfaces more ‘user friendly.’ Reality becomes relative to perspective. We are living in the ‘post-truth’ era some have heralded. Zero’s time-consuming painting process affords us the possibility to take responsibility to picture reality for ourselves. The questions his canvases pose to the viewer encourage us to keep our consciousness wide enough awake to figure out what it is that we are looking at.

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That entropy is beautiful in and of itself. A strange palimpsest of objects of desire, a strangely fractured means of creating identity, of creating something original amidst the visually saturated ‘society of the spectacle’ that is the mechanism by which Capitalism operates, as Guy Debord so eloquently theorised in 1967. To see is to consume, to visualise is to behold, says the Capitalist belief system. So to fracture the image is to rebel, to collage is to dream outside the order of this system. Zero articulates this fragmentation in the titles of his paintings, which refer to the ‘glitch’ or the digital language of file names: bAQV, cnsole log, or dx3c4fa.”

Excerpt from Natasha Norman’s text for set user (2018)