“What if I painted myself as a marshmallow? That could be either really stupid or really great,” said Sasha Gordon in her Bushwick studio. The artist was standing in front of a painting of herself as, yes, a marshmallow. Of a small scale and not yet finished, the work struck me as simultaneously cheeky and uncanny.
Gordon’s marshmallow woman wears glasses, her hair is pulled up with twigs in the place of chopsticks, and the hair is slightly scorched. “She’s a kind of sexy librarian character,” she said of the white-on-white figure on canvas. “Flames are going in the corners. I just try to make these as weird as I can. I get frustrated when there isn’t any of that strangeness in a painting.”
Weirdness is one of the cornerstones of the 25-year-old New York painter’s visual world. Among the most sought-after young artists, Gordon is known for her hyper-personal, near-hallucinatory paintings of her doppelgänger. Throughout her compositions, versions of Gordon appear as fickle and fluctuating manifestations marked by a distinct unnaturalness—subjects depicted may have fluorescent skin or traipse through Surrealist nightscapes. These visions are anxious and intimate at once, teetering somewhere between tenderness and night terrors. Her avatars, with their myriad antics, offer Gordon an avenue for exploring contradictory emotions and complex personal experiences.