"The star of the show is a seven-foot-tall painting called Pruning, in which Gordon is trapped in a Houdini-like tank of water, forced down by a faceless female. (Doubles proliferate in Gordon's work - could the faceless torturer also be her?) Bubbles of air escape her mouth while her knees press against the aquarium glass until it cracks. The tank's rusting iron frame doubles as metaphor: the strictures of gender and race that imprison her."
"Growing up a queer Korean Jewish American in Westchester County produced a schism in which she was both fetishized and rendered invisible. In "Haze," Gordon uses her body to stage a story about how identity is scripted and distorted - often by herself. Gordon plays all the roles - victim and villain, the stabbed and the stabber - laying bare how Asian women have internalized contradictory ideals: docile yet hypersexual."
Sasha Gordon's Haze cycle of large hyperrealist self-portraits stages visceral tableaux that explore identity, gender, race, eroticism, and survival through cinematic and horror tropes. A seven-foot painting, Pruning, shows Gordon trapped in a water tank, pressed by a faceless female as glass cracks, with the rusting frame symbolizing racial and gender strictures. The canvases use theatrical lighting, lurid colors, and slippery imagery to weaponize sexuality and unsettle voyeuristic consumption. Born to a Polish American father and immigrant Korean mother, Gordon foregrounds a fractured upbringing as a queer Korean Jewish American who was both fetishized and rendered invisible, playing victim and villain to expose internalized contradictions.
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