In the nude section of the 5th floor gallery, a piece titled “My Friend Will Be Me” by Sasha Gordon stands out boldly from the rest. It shows a persona of the artist, a woman with otherworldly purple skin with a big smile, in the middle of painting a nude study of herself, which had a much more realistic and gentler color palette than the persona. Gordon’s intent, as said through the description of the artwork, was grappling with her Polish-Jewish and Korean-American identity. In the picture being drawn by her persona, she is painting over the yellow base of the picture with a white paintbrush. While I do not share the same experience as Gordon regarding this idea of race, I relate to the feeling of painting yourself in a different way than you really are. That indigo skin reminds me of how disconnected I felt from anyone else in early high school, so instead of trying to socialize more, I dove deeper into my digital art. In this art, I’d represent myself in different characters, but if I drew myself, I often changed physical traits of mine that I didn’t like to something else I thought made me “prettier”. It’s a tradeoff of creating an identity through art, while also losing some of yourself as well.