Multiplying the Self: Identity and Anxiety on the Canvas

Sasha Gordon (b. 1998, Somers, NY) paints self-portraits like someone testing a mirror to see what might crack first — the glass or the person staring back. In ‘Haze’, her first solo exhibition at David Zwirner, she casts her own face and body in every role: the survivor, the aggressor, the witnesser. Instead of using her likeness to declare who she is, she uses it to ask what happens when you stop pretending you’re only one thing.

Gordon’s self-portraits are hyperrealistic and characterized by color and control. Every hair, body curve and emotion is rendered with obsessive care. Her technical mastery is not a show-off but a way to contain chaos and make fear hold still long enough to study it. That anxiety she admits to in interviews—the feeling of being “on alert” in your own skin—is made literal through a body that is always her own. Even when the scenes are extreme like a woman held under water, a force-feeding or a sky lit by explosion, they land as personal rather than theatrical. It reads less like she loves horror for spectacle but more like she has found the emotional temperature to match the weather inside her—lush, vivid, and unsettling. It feels like Gordon has learned anxiety itself how to pose for a portrait.

There is humor inside that dread, the kind you use when you’re scared but refuse to show it. In ‘It Was Still Far Away’, the world seems to blow up behind a Gordon-self-portrait calmly clipping her toenails with headphones on. That is exactly the coping mechanism she has described — dissociation as strategy, anxiety polished into composure. The color palette radiates heat, but her expression is pure cool detachment. The self-portrait becomes a poker face.

What is striking is how fond she seems of her own characters, even when they are violent toward “herself.” Because every figure is a self-portrait, the antagonists do not feel like villains so much as other moods of the same person — the parts of us that drag us, shame us, train us, or try to keep us alive by any means.

If the show has an aftertaste, it is the sense that Gordon is not performing identity but metabolizing it through repeated images of her own body. She uses self-portraits the way some people use diaries: to see if the truth changes once it is made visible. ‘Haze' works not because the paintings are technically dazzling, though they are, but because they show someone painting the thing she cannot get away from — herself, multiplied and unsupervised. And not only herself, but the collective anxiety and traumas of our times.