Sasha Gordon’s “Surrogate Self” Opens at the ICA Miami
Sasha Gordon’s first solo museum exhibition, featuring new and recent works, is on view at the ICA Miami from December 5, 2023, until March 10, 2024. Surreal self-portraits with themes of identity, emotion, and a strong acknowledgment of art-historical portraiture, her paintings lead viewers through a spectrum of transformative feelings and depictions of self, and brim with thought-provoking textures and details. To learn more about the show and the self-examination in the artist’s oeuvre, Whitewall spoke to Gordon ahead of the opening.
Sasha Gordon, photo by William Jess Laird.
WHITEWALLER: Tell us about your show at ICA Miami. What was your starting point?
SASHA GORDON: The show has to do with anthropomorphism and personification. I started diving into this theme a few months ago. I’ve always been intrigued by figuration and portraiture; I paint myself frequently, so I try to make it more interesting for myself to paint.
The figures in my works as of now are transforming, escaping, and becoming these different things. It has a lot to do with queerness, feeling as though I have to disguise myself in certain situations, and being scared of drawing attention to it. I didn’t know what queerness looked like for me, and I was feeling very disconnected and othered.
This theme also deals with differing surfaces, hardness versus softness. I try to show emotion not just through expression, but also through the skin, because there are ways in which the skin and what the skin is made out of can also express emotion.
Sasha Gordon, “Pinky Promise,” 2022, photo by Genevieve Hanson, courtesy the artist and Matthew Brown.
Sasha Gordon Taps into the Power of Emotions
WW: One of the works in the show, Volcano, deals with the idea that anger in men often equals strength and power, but in women it’s more frequently perceived as instability. Can you tell us more about the work?
SG: Anger can rule all emotion when you give power to it. I’m bipolar, so when I feel an emotion, I really feel it and the change from one emotion to another is very dramatic. I felt like this painting was necessary—anger is such a distinct emotion and very subjective. Having this naturally formed mountain erupting validates the anger that she has, because it’s natural.
WW: Something we see frequently in your compositions is this idea of transformation and multiple versions of the same person. How does this visual device relate to your own life and your identity as a queer Asian American woman?
SG: Painting myself is how I feel close to myself. It’s how I reflect and how I ask questions, and I would not feel connected to my work if it wasn’t my body and my face being displayed. It would be hard to put these different anxieties and experiences on a figure other than myself.
At first it had to do with representing my identity and reflecting on years of discomfort surrounding it. Now it’s that I exist as a queer Asian woman and the scenes I create are a product of my experience as this identity. There are moments where I’m conscious of being this identity, but there are also many moments where I just exist.
Sasha Gordon, “Almost A Very Rare Thing,” 2022, photo by Genevieve Hanson, courtesy the artist and Matthew Brown.
Sasha Gordon Paints a Juxtaposition of Anxieties and Humor
WW: Your works are often infused with ideas of discomfort, abnormality, and uncanniness. How has painting with these emotional, surrealist visuals helped you navigate the real world?
SG: I paint about my anxieties, my current worries, and about just never knowing what will happen next. Dealing with trauma, I try to inform it with humor—especially with being so obsessive, you have morbid moments where you think the world is ending, but then you can drag yourself out of that hole realizing it’s all self-projection and most of your thoughts are not true at all. I try to juxtapose the dark topics of my work with humor, to show the light in these dark scenes. Painting these anxieties and the discomfort I have is a way for me to confront these issues, to help me reflect and take power [over] these anxieties.
