Mythos
Sasha Baskin
May 23 - July 15, 2024
Receptions:
Opening reception: May 24th 2024 5-8pm
Artist Talk: May 24th 6:30pm
First Friday Reception: June 7th 2024 5-8pm
Gravers Lane Gallery is pleased to announce Sasha Baskin’s first solo exhibition at GLG, MYTHOS. The exhibit will open with a reception and artist talk on Friday, May 24th 5-8pm at Gravers Lane Gallery, in Chestnut Hill and will close July 15th 2024. Sasha is a fiber artist who uses intricate traditional weaving and lace making processes in combination with source imagery from reality television. This body of work puts the mathematically complex and ancient craft of bobbin lace weaving into a relevant contemporary context. Love in the age of reality TV; an anthropological look at our culture’s myths, unraveling with the pull of a thread.
Trained in classical drawing, Baskin received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2014. Transitioning to craft and studying weaving, natural dyes, and lacemaking processes, she received her Master of Fine Arts in Craft and Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2018. In her work, Sasha explores how reality television dating shows like “The Bachelor” and “Love is Blind” function as modern mythological systems and create new gods and goddesses for this generation. This work involves deep research into pop culture and an examination of reality TV like a classical text. She weaves screenshots like chapters in a Hero’s Journey and overlays digital patterns and lace grids to create veiled goddesses out of reality television starlets. To study beauty, love, drama, and competition: to entertain and distract through drama? Each season is the Iliad and the Odyssey in high heels and hair extensions.
Drawing from Baudrillard’s concept of “hyperreality” and simulation and simulacrum, this series of work examines blurring of the distinction between real and unreal, reality and reality television. Each work becomes a new screen, a new layer of meaning through which a scene from reality television is conveyed. Every new episode of a dating show becomes a new mythological rendering, a new hero’s journey to follow, to worship, to retell and recount. With each podcast, the recap, the meme, and repost, the echoes of these narratives become new mythologies that become the mainstays of our era.
A final rose recipient on “The Bachelor” can become a modern Helen of Troy when she tries to flee the show and break the structure of the past 23 seasons. When she is trapped in her hotel room and forced to resume the season, she becomes (as was Helen) a prisoner of forces she cannot see or control. She is both powerless in the moment while extraordinarily powerful: Helen of Troy started the Trojan War; Cassie from Season 23 of “The Bachelor” changed the nature of the franchise and redefined the structure of reality television.
A bride-to-be on “Love is Blind” can become a mythic goddess as she is insulted by her fiance and compared to another contestant. “You’re a nine out of ten,” her fiance tells her in comparison to another woman (a definite “ten out of ten”). Zenab from Season 3 looks down, her hair falling in front of her face like a veil and the distance between her fiance becomes visible. In this moment she becomes Penelope: faithful and steadfast despite her partner's dalliances.
Reality television exists to remind us to feel comfortable in our own reality. If falling in love on tv is fake, my love is real. Hyperreality exists to make us feel comfortable in our own existence. This work seeks to question that comfort and how we engage with the reality television narratives which surround us. Through bobbin lace and woven images the pieces capture the immediacy of pop culture with the slow analog process of thread. The images themselves unravel. Slow down. Examine the simulation frame by frame.
