In her latest exhibition at Hands of Others, currently showing at Jeffrey Deitch in Recent York, Sasha Gordon uses absurdist self-portraiture to focus on the conflicting issues in her personal life. Nevertheless, as an alternative of allowing her audience to sympathise with the stark emotions in her paintings, Gordon’s work is supposed to perturb us; there’s a way of unnerving voyeurism when viewing these images as if we’re seeing something we should always not. 

“I’ve all the time felt really uncomfortable [in my body],” the Brooklyn-based artist tells Dazed. “I need the viewer to feel the identical discomfort of being on this body that’s being critiqued and checked out on a regular basis. I used to be all the time very hypervigilant about how I would seem to people… I wish to make the material that my figures are wearing form of itchy and you may see every fibre. They’re very sensitive to what they’re wearing and the way they’re taking on space. I’m turning the tables and having the viewer also feel that.”

Hands of Others is Gordon’s first collection since completely ending art school (she studied painting at Rhode Island School Of Design). The work is being shown as part of a bigger group show at Jeffrey Deitch, Wonder Woman, which goals to explore the experiences of Asian women artists – an experience that’s unimaginable to miss in Gordon’s self-portraits.

“My work is unquestionably for the Asian-American audience, which is for me also. I all the time thought I wasn’t capable of take up space and be weird. I all the time felt like I needed to assimilate and fly under the radar to maintain myself secure. So creating these really bizarre scenes where these women are those that seem like me are form of identical to doing things that aren’t normally accepted by Asian people, it’s showing that we’re greater than only a monolith and one-dimensional.”

She continues, “For me, it’s essential for them to seem like me since it’s my experience, but just talking about bodies and accepting yourself, and dissociating but being so everlasting at the identical time, makes them relatable to anyone in a marginalised body.”

As Gordon has grown up, her art has grown alongside her. While her work previously drew on her own childhood experiences, the newest collection has a more adolescent edge. Gordon tells me that this happened naturally, with Hands of Others coping with topics she previously shied away from – similar to her OCD, her queerness and her trichotillomania. But she finds catharsis within the honesty: “It’s a way for me to manage but additionally share my experiences and create a dialogue,” she says.

The age-old adage that art must be uncomfortable springs to mind when first viewing Gordon’s work, but on reflection, there’s reassurance to be found on the canvas, because it represents the overall discomfort of existing. For all of the memes questioning our dislike of being perceived, Gordon is forcing us to perceive how we feel and appear when no person is around.

Hands of Others is showing at Jeffrey Deitch until June 25, 2022