Preterist

Sadie Starnes was born in the American South, 1985, and spent her early years in the country and mountains of North Carolina. After completing BAs in Art History and Painting, she moved to New York City and then Tokyo where she currently resides in the suburban fringes of the city.

The history of her painting is visually and conceptually grounded in the South, its myths and sins, and her family’s history in it. She continually returns, almost involuntarily, to the cultural iconography of the pasture, the mule, birth, salt – intermingled with portraits of deceased ancestors, their neighbors, and her own childhood.

These paintings concern afterbirth as representative of memory, of loss, and the phenomena of panmnesia – a belief that no memory is ever lost or inaccessible. "The Afterbirth" is the placental glimpses of cotton mouthed and film-eyed selfness, a visual map of these memories and their place – as dubious as they are telling – in present life.