Within the economy of attention and emotions that now governs our “connected” daily lives, Love in all senses of the term has gradually become a workable resource that can generate a lot of capital. In this market of deregulated, intrusive, and pernicious emotions, with slogans that are by turns cryptic, conventional, or aggressive, the work of Ash Love has emerged, who, through their paintings, sculptures, and performances, takes stock of a counter-language reacting to the reification of love, moods, and affects, and tending towards a collective, sentimental, and acknowledged reappropriation of emotions.
Ash Love’s artworks are constituted by a multitude of symbols deriving from the codes of adolescent digital pop culture since the 2000s, such as emojis, glyphs, or magic number combinations. For the artist, this kind of neo-dialect reveals the contemporary communication regime each of us can identify with, based on new codes and thus create micro-communities. It therefore contributes to an interesting subversion of language. The materials that Love uses are characteristic of the teenage creative world, such as inexpensive, colourful beads taken from the necklaces or bracelets of children’s jewellery boxes, silk ribbons, or the padlocks and keys of personal diaries. Ash Love doesn’t skimp on varnish, shiny effects, or generous and unctuous forms to accentuate the effects of these source objects. The flashy aspect of this hyper-visual formal strategy enables them to dissimulate more personal subjects and commitments, such as sexualities outside of the heteronormative system, questions of identity, or how to form and maintain communities in the present climate. It is a political position that seeks to exist artistically through poetry. A vast, orchestrated melancholy thus emanates from these multiple stories, emitted like calls for help, and that it is doubtful will ever reach their target.
Ash Love’s aesthetic world is full of knots, evoking at once tangled and desperate situations, but also the unions and alliances that the act of knotting can generate. Many forms or symbols attest to the presence of a techno-spirituality among our contemporaries, superstitions emerging from an agonising rationalism, a neo-pagan magic that people in search of meaning have constructed, throughout turbulent periods of history. Their artworks thus convoke the material language that human communities resort to in order to share their sorrows and wounds, caused by an inability to live in a segregated world, contaminated by all manner of underhand practices.
As part of their residency in Lindre-Basse, Ash Love pursues their research on the subversion of language, the edification of alternative narratives, and the digital processing of emotions in our virtually connected societies. Between productions, readings, and moments of analysis, this residency period will be punctuated by a shared meal, prepared and orchestrated by the artist and their two mothers, with the aim of putting into practice their research on sharing and the communal construction of our futures.
Ash Love and the CAC - la synagogue de Delme would like to thank ENSAD Nancy and Nabil Ben Ameur (Head of Ceramics Workshop) and Théophile Caille (blowtorch glassmaker in Nancy) for their support during this residency.
The artist residency programme is organised by the CAC - la synagogue de Delme in collaboration with the Lorraine Regional Natural Park and the village of Lindre-Basse.