Nostalgic and eerie, Sasha Yasov paints the traces people leave behind in video games

May 19, 2026 - 07:26

The Tbilisi-based artist works with a strange and familiar palette. She takes screenshots from The Sims, Second Life, and Grand Theft Auto, then runs them through Blender and airbrushing. The result is something that sits between a vivid memory and a digital glitch. Her images feel like places you have been before, but cannot quite recall. Empty living rooms in suburban houses. A car parked under a streetlight that never quite turns off. A figure standing still, waiting for a command that will never come.

Yasov is interested in the traces people leave behind. Not the obvious ones, like chat logs or high scores, but the quiet evidence of presence. A chair pulled slightly away from a table. A half-eaten meal on a counter. These are the details that make a virtual world feel lived in. By stripping away the players and the action, she turns these spaces into something eerie. The nostalgia hits first, then the unease. You realize these rooms were never meant to be empty. They were designed for movement, for interaction. Without it, they become monuments to absence.

Her process is deliberate. She does not just capture a scene. She rebuilds it, softening edges, washing out colors, adding a haze that feels like heat or memory. The airbrushing gives the work a tactile quality, as if the image has been handled, worn down by time. It is a gentle but unsettling way to ask what happens to a place when no one is looking. The answer, in Yasov's hands, is that it waits. It waits for someone to come back and sit on that couch, to open that fridge, to drive that car into the night. And in the waiting, it becomes a ghost.