My Love of Upholstery
Untitled

Sasha Gordon creates surreal paintings and drawings that explore themes of sexuality, gender, race, and the body. Often depicting herself as subject, Gordon is keenly attuned to art historical themes of portraiture and self-portraiture, and of the politics of representation. She approaches these categories with inventiveness and humor, using the uncanny to communicate very real concerns around self-image and identity.

For the High Line – Moynihan Connector Billboard, Gordon presents two works, My Love of Upholstery (2024) and Untitled (2024). Both hail from the artist’s most recent body of work, in which she examines challenging taboos and standards of representation. Her images present a wide range of emotional states, frequently considered through the lens of her identity as a queer Asian American woman. Through endless avatars, she portrays the othering of unconventional human bodies and her own experiences of alienation. Towering over 30th Street and Dyer Avenue, the artist’s fluctuating visage appears at massive scale, marked by a distinct unnaturalness—in My Love of Upholstery, where she depicts herself with a Pinocchio-like wood-grain body, and in Untitled, in which her face and pupils are marked with five-pointed stars. These visions are simultaneously anxious and intimate, teetering somewhere between tender fantasy and nightmare. Her avatars, looming large within their frames, offer both artist and audience an outlet for exploring contradictory emotions and complex personal experiences.