BIO

Sasha Baskin uses traditional weaving and lacemaking processes in combination with source imagery from reality television to consider how shows like “The Bachelor” and “Love is Blind” function as a modern mythological system and the creation of new gods and goddesses. 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.

Her exhibition record includes The Baltimore Museum of Art, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, Blue Spiral 1 Gallery in Asheville, NC, and the Visual Arts Center in Austin, TX. Baskin was a 2018-2019 Artist in Residence at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and a 2020 and 2022 Penland Winter Resident. Her teaching record includes undergraduate coursework at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Johns Hopkins University, Stevenson University, and Virginia Commonwealth University as well as workshops at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, John C Campbell Folk School, and Penland School of Craft. Baskin currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore Maryland. 

GALLERY

ARTIST STATEMENT

When I watch reality television I see a mythological tableau of cocktail dresses and hair extensions. What is reality television but another attempt to represent human interaction? 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.

We do this over and over again. We tell the same stories in new ways. My work examines this repetitive structure, this drive to create repetitive mythologies and simulated versions of reality. 

I pull screenshots from reality television dating shows “The Bachelor”and “Love is Blind” and take reference from renaissance mythological paintings. This work involves deep research into pop culture and an examination of reality tv like a classical text. I weave screenshots like chapters in an Hero’s Journey and overlay digital patterns and lace grids to create veiled goddesses out of reality television starlets.